Tag: Amazon

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FirefoxFirefox 3 Beta 1 is out. Nice so far. Oddly enough, it runs better than the current Opera 9.5 previews on my old Linux box at work, though that mostly seems to be the fault of the find-in-history option.

I usually avoid any sort of shopping on the day after Thanksgiving, online included, but I’ve been getting email from various online stores that are trying to get into Black Friday. Amazon is advertising a Black Friday Sale, and Apple is promoting a “special one-day shopping event” on their website—and annoyingly, neither of them is giving any clue as to what sort of deals are involved. Amazon keeps forwarding me to today’s deals, and Apple just says something’s coming. And neither site lists actual hours. Is it midnight to midnight? What time zone?

Amazon KindleSpeaking of Amazon, their entire home page is currently taken up by the announcement of their new eBook reader, Kindle. At $400 I’m not going to rush out and buy one, but it looks like they’ve solved some of the main e-book problems: it’s small, light and wireless, and they even bring up the reading-in-bed issue in the intro. The real question is going to be compatibility & openness: It’ll read plain text, HTML, Word, and a few other document formats (and they’re promoting its access to Wikipedia), so it should be possible for other stores to sell books for the device. And what about the e-book offerings themselves? Will they be loaded down with draconian digital rights management like the Adobe ebooks of a few years ago, or are they following the model of Amazon’s MP3 store?* In a nice change, their music downloads are entirely DRM-free and they use it as a selling point. Edit: Per Andrea’s comments and further research, Kindle ebooks are locked down with DRM. No, thanks!

The name, however, makes me wonder how soon they’ll offer Fahrenheit 451.

Finally, the Internet Storm Center has an insightful response to the statement, “There is nothing on my computer that a hacker would be interested in.” Let’s leave aside the question of your personal data for the moment. Just the fact that you’ve got a computer with an internet connection could prove very useful to someone who wants to cover their tracks or just add more power to their own distributed system.

* Amazon’s MP3 store is also surprisingly cheap. I replaced my old tapes of the original cast recordings of Les Misérables (Broadway) and Phantom Of The Opera for $9 each—they run upwards of $30 on CD.

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Amazon.com’s search site, A9, has scaled back drastically. The rewards program is gone, as are bookmarks and history. They’ve even discontinued the A9 toolbar.

This of course brings up questions about some of the site integration technologies that they developed. OpenSearch has already taken on a life of its own, and in fact the new A9 seems to be mostly an OpenSearch aggregator. But what of SiteInfo? Continue reading →

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I let Amazon.com send me notices every once in a while, just in case something interesting pops up. This qualifies, though not in the way I expected:

Based on your recent purchases, we thought you might like to know that you can save up to 65% on summer favorites in men’s, women’s, children’s, and shoes.

The thing is, I’ve never bought clothing from Amazon! Books, CDs, the occasional DVD, some computer software. But no clothing, though they’ve tried to convince me. T-shirts aside, I prefer to be able to try something on before I buy it.

Assuming they actually are using their recommendations system, I think they must have just checked the clothing category for the mailing, and left the “based on…” phrase in the template. Though sometimes cross-category recommendations can be strange. I’m often amazed at things I find in my rec list that have no relation to the things I bought or rated that supposedly triggered the recommendation, simply because those items are popular enough to cut across multiple interests. Of course, right now the only thing they recommend for me in “apparel” is a Darth Vader mask, which I find somewhat disturbing…

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I’m going to have to stop using Amazon’s super-saver free shipping. It doesn’t let you choose the carrier (which, I’m sure, is part of why it’s free). For whatever reason, Amazon shipped part of my latest order by Priority Mail and part of it by UPS. Random paperback novel? Arrived safely in a locked mailbox three days ago. Mac OS X Tiger? UPS left a notice on the door today indicating that they need someone to sign for it in person, and they’ll try again during work hours tomorrow.

*Sigh*

Either that, or I’m just going to have to start asking Amazon to ship things to the office instead. As it is, I’ve asked UPS to redirect this package, but if their website is to be believed, they won’t be able to do so until Monday. So much for using Saturday to upgrade.