…why have they been serving me ads for divorce attorneys lately? Do they know something I don’t know? This sounds like the plot of a Stephen King short story…computer user slowly realizes Google Ads are predicting his future…
And I don’t need a divorce attorney, thank you very much!
Domain name squatting is nothing new. Some of the latest variations are link farms that artificially pump up a site in Google search results, and fake re-blogs that re-publish articles on legit blogs. Apparently, even more elaborate schemes exist.
My neighborhood has had a domain and a website for some time. I took over its administration two years ago. After receiving very poor service from the web host (applications breaking, slow response times, etc.), I moved the site over to my own server at somnius.com. However, when I tried to transfer the domain, a .org, to somnius, the previous web host blocked me. Apparently the domain was still registered to the previous administrator. After spending way too much time trying to get through the red tape, I gave up and decided to let the .org domain expire. I registered the same domain as a .com, pointed it to the site on somnius, and we were up and running.
After the .org expired earlier this month, I went to snarf it up so that I could have both the .com and old .org pointing to the site. To my surprise, I find that the .org had been registered out from under me by a company based out of Thailand called Transliner Consultants. Apparently, they had grabbed the .org almost the same minute it expired.
Some quick research on Transliner Consultants finds that they have a suspicious record of fraudulent domain name registration, and have over 450 domain names registered as of today. I suspect that these guys busy-wait on expiring domains, then register them quickly, hoping to capture traffic for ad revenue, or in order to sell them back to the previous owner for an unreasonable price.
In this case, it doesn’t matter. The domain was just for a neighborhood website, and having the .com is more than good enough. We’ll survive just fine without the .org.
Music is now priced by the song, or track, rather than by the album. I suspect that this pricing is going to incentivize artists and labels in one direction and consumers in another.
The days of 20-minute side long tracks are likely over. First of all, there are no more sides, so the 20 minute limit on a track is gone. However, the price of a 20 minute, or 30 or 40 minute, track is the same as that of a 20, 30 or 40 second track. Or at least that seems to be the case on popular sites such as iTunes and eMusic. When consumers buy by the track, it is likely that artists and labels are paid the same amount regardless of track length.
In a McLuhan-esque fashion, this will motivate artists and labels to record more tracks of shorter duration. They might even break up an intended 20 minute piece into several shorter sections. However, consumers are pulled the opposite direction. It is far less expensive for them to purchase longer tracks, as they get more music for their money.
Tzadik pulled their catalog from eMusic, reportedly because they felt they were losing royalties on longer tracks. This serves no one, as now a large potential audience doesn’t have access to their offerings.
In my own purchasing on eMusic, I find that I tend to buy longer tracks more on whim and at the spur of the moment, and tend to delay or avoid purchasing albums with more than 12 or so short tracks.
Obviously there is a middle ground, and it has been adopted by other sites, most notably the battered AllOfMP3, where pricing is based on the length of the track or album. This is a fair solution for both producers and consumers.
Here’s a simple alternative for people who think ISP bandwidth is wasted by peer-to-peer traffic.
Most last-mile systems, such as DSL and cable have far less upstream capacity than downstream capacity. If the upstream is congested, tiered flat-rate pricing will likely resolve the issue. ISPs can package their service in flat-rate tiers, for example, 128 Kbps, 512 Kbps, 1 Mbps, etc. The pricing can be used as self-imposed congestion control on customers. If the higher tiers are priced appropriately, few people will use them. Thus, total upstream bandwidth is constrained per user according to what they want to pay, but within each tier, the service is all-you-can-eat.
Guess what…ISPs already use tiered pricing. There’s no need to block peer-to-peer, just expand a pricing scheme that already exists.
I’ve been an IEEE member since 1993. I’m not sure why I renew every year, and have seriously considered dropping my membership each year for the last few, as it doesn’t seem to serve my career in any significant way.
I’m not interested in the researchy articles. Some of the practical overviews are good references. However the main issue I have is that the IEEE has yet to figure out how to make their services convenient for people who don’t want to receive print magazines and journals. These dead-tree publications take up space and I’ll read maybe 1 of 50 articles, if that.
What I want is electronic access to the 1-2% of the articles I would like to read. The IEEE has had a version of online access to articles for years, but it has been inconvenient and clunky. The basic problem they have never solved is making it easy for a reader to quickly get access to just the articles they want.
Here’s a free idea for the IEEE. Set up an RSS feed for each magazine. Allow anyone to subscribe to the feed, even if they are not a magazine subscriber or even an IEEE member. The feed will provide the article title, authors and abstract. Clicking on the feed entry will take you to a web page that allows you to download the article, if you are a legit subscriber, or asks you to pay for it if you are not. Seems like a no-brainer. Web startups do this sort of thing all the time. Why can’t a gigantic organization like the IEEE?
I digress…
In any case, my membership renewal papers arrive in the mail the other day. So I go online to renew. In the past, this process has been relatively painless. This year I wanted to change over to 100% electronic access, so I can stop throwing out all of the print copies I keep getting in the mail.
But I find that I cannot log into the site, even with what I know is the right userid and password. Turns out that the site doesn’t support Firefox. That’s a big no-no in 2007. So I switch to Internet Explorer and get in.
Next I try to update my profile to indicate my new job, employer, and so on. But when I go to do so, the site causes IE to spawn iterative copies of itself. Within seconds I have 20 IE windows launched, and counting. I kill IE from the task manager and try again a couple of times with the same outcome. So I scrap changing the profile.
On to the business of getting switching over to electronic-only delivery. I pick out a few magazines I’d like to receive in electronic format. They go into my cart along with the membership renewal. I check out…but no, my cart is invalid. The site doesn’t tell me why, it just won’t let me check out. I mess around for a while, finally just deleting everything but my membership renewal and trying again. If the items themselves are invalid or if they require being combined with other items, the site should tell me AS I put them into my cart not AFTER they are already in my cart and I’m trying to check out.
I vaguely remember that some magazines are part of memberships to particular societies, such as the communications or computer societies. So I go to add a couple of society memberships. But there are no options for electronic-only society memberships. If you join a society, it appears that you have to receive a dead-tree version of all of the associated literature, even if each individual magazine has an electronic-only option (though I can’t seem to check out with electronic-only anything).
All of this messing around is taking time. Even on Thanksgiving Day, when you’d expect minimal traffic, the site is slow with pages often taking 20-30 seconds to load. Wasting time is something I’m just not going to do. So I choose the renewal and the society memberships with print and electronic access, and vow to recycle everything the IEEE sends me in print.
I don’t need to explain how e-commerce sites like Amazon have been making product selection and shopping cart management easy for years and years. This was a case of me, the customer, knowing exactly what I wanted but being unable to purchase it. Various emails as well as literature that came with my renewal package had implied that I could choose electronic-only subscriptions. The site even allowed me to choose electronic-only subscriptions, but I couldn’t complete the renewal with them in my cart.
The IEEE is an engineering society. Apparently the organization doesn’t practice what it preaches about software engineering and usability engineering. Their site and its renewal process is one of the most poorly designed I’ve been subjected to in quite a while. Even some early-stage web startups have done a better job making it easy for the customer to get in and out of their service, so it is not a matter of manpower - it is a matter of design, development, and testing.
Frankly, the site is barely beta quality and has several obvious bugs. If I were in charge of the it and was presented with it as it stands today, I’d fire the developers, or at least send them back to square one.
Mark Cuban, who usually has reasonable, well thought out points behind his arguments, has been missing the point lately in his bashing of peer to peer traffic. His latest missive states:
So I’ve come up with a better way to get rid of P2P without calling for an outright disabling of the protocol. Maybe ISPs should just treat upstream bandwidth the way cellphone companies treat minutes. Give users an option on how many upstream bits they want to be able to use and during what times of day.
Charge more during prime usage times, less during off hours. For most internet users, like probably 99pct of us, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference in our bills or consumption. In fact, many of us could opt for cheaper plans because beyond the family photos or videos we may upload every now and then, or the rare backup of our hard drives, most people don’t consume much outbound bandwidth at all.
There’s a few reasons why this is a bad idea, but I’ll just focus on the show-stopper. People don’t think in terms of bits. Maybe a few of us technologists do, or can, or want to, but most people can’t, don’t want to, and won’t.
If ISPs start charging differentially for upstream traffic, I predict they will lose any potential savings just on the pure volume of customer support calls.
Technology newbie Aunt Millie doesn’t know whether that picture is a few kilobytes or two megabytes. She just wants to upload it. She also has no idea how much traffic Skype generates, she just wants to make free calls.
Even worse, she doesn’t understand how downloading a set of very large files, such as from iTunes or a video-on-demand site, causes acknowledgment traffic to flow upstream, adding to her upload bills.
Or what about those programs you install on your PC that “phone home” or periodically push information up to the net? Even a sophisticated user might not even be aware that this is happening…until he sees his bill.
You can charge people for access and you can charge them for discrete transactions. People understand these things. You can’t charge them for bits. You’ll just piss them off.
Flat rate pricing is the best thing that ever happened to the Internet, and it has been so successful and influential that telephony pricing has followed suit. It is the future, not the past.
Find a different way to make money.
My morning commute, from home to the local train station, largely consists of about 4 miles of driving north along a main road. Unfortunately for me, this main road is used by thousands of other commuters, either heading to the train station, a local employer, or the highway.
On an ideal day, with little or no traffic, I can make it to the train station in 15 minutes, so I would give myself about a 5 minute buffer for parking and walking to the platform. Thus, I’d leave about 20 minutes before the train is due. On a typical weekday morning, I give myself about 30 minutes.
However my actual commute can vary dramatically, with a swing of over 10 minutes, based on a couple of factors. The first is the light where the north-south main road meets an east-west main road. The intersection just does not have the capacity to handle rush hour, and sometimes it can take several cycles of the light to make it though. The second factor is that the dominate north-bound traffic pattern is a cluster of about 30-60 cars. If I get in front of such a cluster when I turn on to the main road, I can make it to the light with fewer cars in front of me. This results in sitting through fewer cycles of the light. If I get stuck behind a cluster, it will literally add minutes of waiting at the light.
A few seconds turns into a few minutes. And the alternate routes are no better.
One of the reasons the intersection is so bad is that it was designed without foresight. Sure, back when the road was put in, far fewer people drove on it. But still some basic common-sense features should have been added. For example, when waiting at the light in a northbound lane, there is no right-hand turn lane. This prevents a number of cars from being able to make a right on red, and these cars add to the congestion for everyone who is going straight. Also, the left-hand turn lane is just a single lane and very shallow. Cars that could take advantage of it are usually stuck behind the cars that are going straight.
In other words, it’s an inefficient mess that a few minor changes could dramatically improve. Make your analogy to software design now.
A way of eliminating these traffic choke points is to widen the road through the intersection, adding one or more deep turn lanes in either direction, and an additional straight lane if possible. This would get many more cars through each cycle of the light, reducing backups and delays, and mitigating the impact of clusters.
Catching up on events, eMusic came out with patch for their new download manager. For the few days that I used it, it worked well. Then they announced that the user backlash had been such that they were reverting back to the old one, though there was an option to continue using the new one. After playing with Free Download Manager for a while, I’ve concluded that eMusic’s old manager is the one for me. It only downloads the MP3’s on a page, it files them in an appropriately names directory, and names all the tracks for me. Free Download Manager defaults to downloading everything on the page, and you have to figure out how to filter out what you don’t want.
School is going reasonably well. I’ll get my the first draft of my second memo back from Legal Writing this week. As long as I didn’t screw it up, the re-write due at the end of the month should not be too bad. I have a short statutory research assignment due this week. I’ve done the research and written a draft of the memo, but the assignment is a bit vague. I’m going to try and meet with the professor this week to clarify a few things. Criminal Law really started coming together for me in the last 2-3 weeks. I’ve completed my outline through the end of October, which means it’s only trailing class by about 2 weeks. Torts is another story, however. My initial attempt at an outline wasn’t very good. I have all of the information for it and just need to get going.
My goal is to finish all of the outlining by Dec. 7. That will leave 4-5 days of studying for the Criminal Law final on Dec. 12, then 9 days of studying for the Dec. 21 Torts final. I suspect that my studying will mostly encompass memorizing rules and taking practice exams. Right now, I’m feeling ok about everything. I’m convincing myself that getting a B+ is good enough.
On the home front, I’m getting decent enough time with the kids. I try to play with them as much as I can on weekends. I’ve been cooking them pancakes each Saturday morning, and trying to read to them each Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night. In between, we’ve been wrestling, playing board games, and this weekend a few fall sports along with jumping in piles of leaves. I need more time with them, but I think we’ll survive until Christmas. I really need more time with the wife, as I tend to neglect her in favor of the kids (she doesn’t seem to mind this…). We need a date, or a series of dates. Again, I’m sure we’ll survive until Christmas.
I’m hitting the gym and running with regularity, which is a really good thing. My back is finally recovering from having to lug a ton of books around (my new wheelie laptop case rocks!) and I’m lifting heavy again. I’m running on the treadmill now that the weather is colder, which means I’ll typically have to settle for shorter, more frequent runs. So far, that has mostly been 1.5 miles twice a week, which is not nearly enough.
Knocking on wood, I’m pleasantly surprised how physically and mentally resilient I’ve been to the stress of job+school+family, without much sleep on the side. I think optimism keeps me going, and I’m hoping I can hang on to it for the next couple of years, at least.
As of late I was noticing delays of up to 30 seconds or more loading this page. I suspected it was a database issue because static pages on this server loaded pretty quickly. This morning I had the web host for this blog move it over to a newer, faster server. So far, I’m noticing an improvement. Let’s hope it holds.