adam @ 404

Wish Lists on Amazon have always been a popular feature. They let you show to everyone else things they should buy you from Amazon. The new twist is the Universal list where you can add anything from any site to your wish list. I definitely like to see my employer heading in a more “open to the rest of the Web” direction with its features.

All you have to do is drag the bookmark button to your toolbar and use it to add entries to your wish list whenever you find a product you want on the web. I’ve added one for a new Lenovo tablet laptop on my wishlist.

Get the Universal Wish List. Apologies for the advertisement, I really like the new feature though. And I’m sure one of you can find a completely inappropriate use for it.

From a review of the new 3g iPhone:

More important, in daily use, I found the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping below 20% by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it entirely ran out of juice on one day. I overcame this problem by learning to use Wi-Fi instead of 3G whenever possible, turning down the screen brightness and even turning off 3G altogether, which the phone permits.

It always amazes me when you give someone the shiniest new tool on the block how they will self-train around major annoyances. Your power source should be the one thing that you shouldn’t have to worry about; power is a major concern when it’s the foundation of electricity and your new shiny device’s operation. Not that this device doesn’t work better than any of the other devices when it’s powered, but to put it bluntly, you sound silly saying you learned how to manually manage the power of your 200 dollar “high tech” device.

One of my New Year’s resolutions is to learn a card game well. Yesterday, I went down to the Central Library to find some books to read on card games. Looking through the Games section I found a book, “Slot Machine Strategy: Winning Methods for Hitting the Jackpot.” My first response was to laugh; I had to read this book.

It’s a quick read, written in an, at times, war story-like style by a “slot veteran.” Even after reading it, the skeptic in me thinks some casino owner union paid the author with the golden pseudonym, Macintyre Symms, to write a book to give people enthusiastic hope that there is actually a winning strategy to a game that is probabilistically stacked against them. The other part of me thinks that somewhere past the cheerleading (”be proud of slots”), annoying over-reliance on anecdotal evidence (especially in the case study section where someone is quoted as saying “slot machines are a lot like the stock market”), and seriously obvious common sense (e.g. don’t gamble on illegal machines or do illegal stuff) , there are some pretty keen tips and observations about the business of slot machines that build a general strategy of slot machines.

The number one reason I think the book is leading people astray is that it doesn’t reinforce the idea that in fact the odds are always against you when playing the slots. It’s truly a gamble and chances are you’re going to lose. If you want a better bet on earning money, go invest in bonds or mutual funds or better yet, work instead of going to the casino. It is mentioned in the book that casinos wouldn’t have slot machines if their aggregate returns didn’t turn a profit on total plays, but it isn’t stressed that every single machine (unit of gambling/dealer) on the floor is going to return a profit over time (even factoring in fixed-costs like the building and machine itself). No matter what machine you play, the odds are against you. Chances are going to be better on certain table games, and in some cases, they can actually be in your favor. But in those cases, the casino can rely on free alcohol, variable pacing, quick talking dealers, wait staff and other elements to serve as distractions to confuse and throw-off gamblers of these thinking games. There are relatively few of the same effective distractions in the “mindless” world of the slots.
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Have you seen my new Amazon Kindle? It’s ridiculous!

My first reaction to the NYTimes article talking about MySpace joining Google-led OpenSocial alliance is, “You sneaky [explicitive].” Facebook has been pioneering the social network platform, and good ‘ole “open” Google comes around with their developer know-how weight and establishes an “alliance” to make things “open.”

Googles move is simply about establishing uniformity, controlling or “leading” the direction of the interfaces and ultimately spending vastly less money getting a foothold (and easing the pain) into every social network, and, once again, getting more user impressions and advertising dollars. Google’s social network site, Orkut, is at the margins of popularity, so what better way to get into the biz than lead an alliance of heavy hitters against the potential threat of Facebook in the impressions business? Not only does it help get a foothold into other sites but it could release a tidal wave of information that Google can sick an army of developers to wrangle into a competing site.

Since other social networking sites aren’t up to the game of establishing their own social platform for developers like Facebook is, of course they’re going to line up behind Google and say, “Yeah buddy, over here, this is what we should all do.” When Facebook first opened up their APIs, my prediction was that MySpace was slowly going to lose numbers (or gain them more slowly) and ultimately be a number 2 or 3 player . After all the hype, they obviously sense that this may be the case and are now technologically struggling to keep up. Google smells the blood and is throwing them a lifeline. If you’ve ever seen a MySpace page you know something is seriously wrong with that company’s tech culture. The entire dynamic of a non-social networking company that is based on monetizing user clicks and impressions, leading an alliance to establish a standard for social networking platforms smells extremely fishy.

p.s. I’m waiting for the social networking backlash where people reach a saturation point and won’t accept anything but face-to-face conversation. Time to think about moving to the mountains again.

I really hope this Verizon Wireless contract of mine runs out soon. I’m not complaining about the fact that their cellular quality of service is, well, probably the best of all providers, but they’re up to their “controlling everything from end-to-end” tricks again. So now they’re suing the FCC over the terms of sale of the latest wireless spectrum. Verizon is a Dinosaur in the age of the Internet, like AOL was until they realized they didn’t have enough market power to demand people get their version of the Internet. If you never experienced AOL in its early years, you might not understand this comparison, but just imagine a world where the services of Google, Amazon, youTube, and Myspace were all provided by AOL and only by AOL and you’re getting close. Now, “do-no-evil” Internet companies are demanding the telecommunication spectrums be given what they’ve needed for years, honest competition and consumer choice.

And Verizon doesn’t like this one bit. They didn’t like me trying to sync my cell phone calendar and contacts to my Mac for a while and they sure don’t like allowing me to move my own files via bluetooth between my phone and other devices. They disable all those factory features and provide their own phone operating system. All the signs are there, Verizon wants to control all channels of access to anything that might involve their services, even when those services run through public airwaves or through public ground. Even if you don’t believe in concepts of public ownership, you rascal of an Objectivist you, you know that the FCC and other government bodies create a regulated field where there aren’t going to be more than 1 set of cable pipes, 1 set of gas lines, 1 set of sewer pipes, or 1 set of phone lines to consumer doorsteps.

Given these realities which are even more real in the electromagnetic spectrum, even libertarians can agree, Verizon is just being silly. The commercial free speech rights of an entity that can purchase the use of a physical radio spectrum from the most powerful government in the world, well, just doesn’t concern me as much as the millions of individual voices they can potentially squelch from a burgeoning global experience. Let’s hope people don’t realize how cool their wireless devices will be when given the freedom of choice on the Internet, ‘cos then Verizasaur will really be screwed.

I’m encouraging you to read up and support Network Neutrality for the Internet. It’s definitely a complex issue, but I encourage you to take a stance and write your elected representatives to tell them to support Net Neutrality.

Recently, The Department of Justice issued a report arguing against any type of network neutrality regulations saying they would ultimately be anti-competive and hinder the free market. In my mind, Network neutrality is about protecting consumers and ensuring non-discriminatory pricing and equal access for all data on the Internet. The same Internet which has been funded by citizens and conceived through research in public institutions. Up to this point, the Internet has been network neutral and we have seen the rise of some amazing things happen on the Web and Internet from virtually little upfront investment. Without net neutrality its easy to imagine circumstances in which customers and companies are essentially levied tolls for what they ‘use’ or offer in addition to the current ISP charges for access.

Another argument from the report that urks me is the claim that if end-consumer broadband ISPs aren’t allowed to charge application and content providers directly (who aren’t necessarily their customers), they won’t be able to keep up with the Internet’s growth in regards to capacity and service needs, passing undue costs to the end-consumer. Companies and consumers already pay the operators of their respective networks for these costs of growth and maintenance, and sometimes citizens even subsidize the expansion of broadband networks through tax dollars (to the private sector for the greater good of the public Internet access).

The fact is, the telecommunications industry is already one of the most monopolistic industries in America today. It’s like the DoJ was so deluded as to say there’s healthy free market activities in the airline industry where major airlines often take corporate welfare bailouts when in the throws of bankruptcy. When’s the last time that there was individual consumer choice over your cable provider? It wasn’t until the recent past that people were given a choice over their long distance providers. The DoJ’s free market rhetoric is disingenous in the face of the industry’s current state for end-consumers. Recent reports that Comcast is shutting off broadband subscribers from their ‘unlimited’ service due to ‘overuse’ without stating any solid policies is the brash behavior of a company enjoying the fruits of too little consumer choice. If network neutrality is not maintained, the only free market that will be fettered is the one which via the Internet has created thousands of jobs and spurred countless innovative technologies and services in the past 15 years.

There’s a thought-provoking column at ArsTechnica proposing that no regulation might be better in the short term because it keeps the network operators under their best behavior and various other reasons. It’s got some weight behind it, but the DoJ report stating that there are studies showing that network operators must charge content providers (web sites) fees directly to keep up with the capacity needs of the Internet suggests they are leaving an open legal door for operators to be on their worst behavior.

As an aside, I would actually be interested in an extensive list of emerging network computing technologies threatened by potential Network Neutrality legislation (e.g. features of ipv6 like flow labeling would be under scrutiny in its application). Legislation does pose the risk of trampling network layer innovation but it’s good to understand what the value of these technologies are, and if they are simply necessary for the future success and progress of the Internet or an overzealous solution to a neutral alternative. From what I’ve read, most deal with providing guaranteed quality of service to the Internet for real-time applications like video streaming.

I read the op-ed article by David Farber and Michael Katz that talked about the real-time needs of a heart monitor application, but my initial thought was ‘Isn’t that was Internet 2 was for?’ and ‘Are you really relying on the Internet cloud for a heart monitor?’ It wasn’t a compelling example for me (I don’t have a hard time imagining a seperate network of networks for life supporting services like health care, fire, emergency response, etc…), but perhaps I’m not taking into account the technical and cost benefits of evolving a single internet to support uses like telemedicine by leveraging the Internet’s (*huhem*) network effect.

The definition of network neutrality suffers from many overloaded meanings in the face of technical topics such as providing quality of service and traffic prioritization (it doesn’t suffer in the face of existing standards for transmission rates and limits because those are widely accepted). Opponents of NN will often point out this ambiguity in the definition arguing that it is against NN to provide QoS and prioritization of traffic since it violates treating all packets equally. Henning Schulzrinne calls this argument a red herring as Network Neutrality does not restrict QoS features as so long as they remain content neutral. So technology offerings for QoS or the prospect of such should not be subject to pricing models or carrier policies that simply take into account the type of application or content data being delivered to consumers.

More content on Net Neutrality:

• Article about a third-way for network neutrality. Interesting read.
• Henning Schulzrinne Audio Testimony (on NYC council resolution) where he talks about Network Neutrality as content and application neutrality.
• ArsTechnica reaction to DoJ report
• Computer Networking: A Top Down Approach Featuring the Internet has a good chapter about multimedia network applications that describes three different camps of network researchers: those that feel the existing best-effort nature of the Internet is satisfactory given incremental increases in bandwidth, those that feel there needs to be a protocol for bandwidth reservation that would require major routing infrastructure changes, and the “differentiated-services” camp that proposes multiple classes of data packets that require minimal changes to routing infrastructure and basic changes at the consumer edge of the network for pricing and policing of the different data request classes.

The NYTimes recently published an article about Fulfillment by Amazon, the team I work with 5 days a week. The program is basically a self-service 3rd party fulfillment solution that provides picking, packing and shipping of your orders. Overall, it was a good article with some minor glitches. It labeled FBA an Amazon Web Service. FBA has web services related to it, but its usually not considered to be just an Amazon Web Service like S3 or EC2, since there are many interfaces to it (one of which are web services).

If any of my adoring readers would like to know more about FBA or try it out, let me know. I can give you the lowdown and help you along. There are some seller forums for FBA now too.

My ipod pooped out on me a couple months back. I’ve been worried about losing my mp3 collection if I ever had a hard drive failure on my mac. Scary stuff. I need to figure out a backup solution. I’m thinking about trying out one user’s solution that utilizes one of Amazon’s web services, Simple Storage Service or S3. Let me get on that one.

Addendum: It took me minutes to setup my Amazon web services account for S3 (it’s quick if you already have an Amazon account), downloaded JungleDisk, put in my S3 info and away I went copying my mp3s into the jungledisk directory. The easiest way to get the files backed up is to run a periodic backup (like once a day). If you notice the backups are causing your network speeds to lag, there’s an option to throttle the backup speeds down so they don’t consume all your throughput. (I’m getting 80Kb/sec upload speeds on a line that is rated at 96Kb/sec, which is pretty damn good considering some of that is taken up by network overhead.) Doing periodic backups is nice since you don’t have to run JungleDisk as a foreground application. A++ I lied about it running in the background. You still have to run JungleDisk to get the automatic backup to start. Kinda lame.

One thing to note is that if you reorganize files around by changing file info, or moving files within the directory, it will delete anything changed and re-backup the files which incurs transfer costs (.20$/Gbyte/month). Luckily, iTunes does a good job of organizing files the first time if you’re downloading from iTunes or importing from CD. With about 16Gb (168 hours of music) of storage and traffic in the first month, I’m looking to spend $5.60 and somewhere around $2.60 every month thereafter if I keep my library relatively static. It’d be nicer if it was half that price, but it’s good enough for peace of mind.

If anyone wants help setting this up, let me know.

I just noticed that when you click on the ‘your store’ tab on Amazon it takes you to a recommendations page that has a tag cloud of different product categories. My biggest tag was ‘Alternative Dance’. I’m so excited, I’m so ashamed!