Entries created on Mon, 02 May 2005

I put Tiger on order from amazon.com on April 17. They had a pretty good deal at $94.99 (suggested retail is $129) and promised to ship on April 28.

At work on Friday, somebody mentioned that microcenter had Tiger boxes on the shelves for $79.99. I was tempted to cancel my amazon order but figured it had already shipped--it was the day after the promised ship date.

Logging on I found that it had not shipped but was Shipping Soon:

We are preparing these items for shipment and this portion of your order cannot be canceled or changed.

So not only had it not shipped the day after promised but I'm now unable to cancel the order. It looked like the earliest I could expect Tiger would be today (May 2nd). I was mildly pissed off but shrugged it off as I was going to be away from the computer all weekend.

This morning I jump on to see what I missed over the weekend. Reviews, tips, tricks, hints, guides, and everything else Tiger dominated my aggregator. This jogs my memory and so I go to amazon to check the status of my order. Imagine my chagrin when the following advert popped up on the same page telling me that my order had still not shipped.

I'm no longer an amazon.com customer.

Bill de hÓra's recent piece makes an interesting connection between two waffling technologies - Semantic Web and Web Services:

The case of the DL and ontology world coming to the Semantic Web and worrying over queries that will blow up in the engines is much like the case of the enterprise world coming to the Web worrying over type systems and discovery languages. The likeness is not fleeting - both the Semantic Web and Web Services advocates have been busy building competing technology stacks in the last decade. They have valid points and good technology but the need or demand for such precision in the Web context has been overestimated.

This reminded of an excellent yet rarely cited piece by Cory Doctorow published by O'Reilly in late 2001 entitled The Carpet Baggers Go Home:

The Internet is unpredictable. It's non-goddamned-deterministic.

...

The Internet is full of fantastically useful and frustratingly unavailable services, from the elegant simplicty of Weblogs.com's XML-RPC interface that accepts a URL and a link-title and shoves 'em on top of the stack of recently updated sites, to the unaffiliated public CVS servers that pock the Internet like so much acne. They work well enough, on average, and if they were all to fail suddenly and at once, the Internet would kind of suck until they came back online. But there are enough of these little tools, enough ways of finding and manipulating information, that users can interpret unreliability as damage and route around it, finding alternate means of communicating and being communicated at.

...

The next generation of Internet entrepreneurs will be people who understand this. They'll be working to provide unreliable services that work in concert with other unreliable services to provide a service that works on average, but not predictably at any given moment. They'll challenge the received wisdom that customers are hothouse flowers, expensive to acquire and prone to wilting at the first sign of trouble. These entrepreneurs will build services that are so compelling that they'll be indispensable, worth using even if the service flakes out when you want it the most.

And Clay Shirky:

Much of the proposed value of the Semantic Web is coming, but it is not coming because of the Semantic Web. The amount of meta-data we generate is increasing dramatically, and it is being exposed for consumption by machines as well as, or instead of, people. But it is being designed a bit at a time, out of self-interest and without regard for global ontology. It is also being adopted piecemeal, and it will bring with it with all the incompatibilities and complexities that implies. There are significant disadvantages to this process relative to the shining vision of the Semantic Web, but the big advantage of this bottom-up design and adoption is that it is actually working now.

And even Richard P. Gabriel:

From 1984 until 1994 I had a Lisp company called "Lucid, Inc." In 1989 it was clear that the Lisp business was not going well, partly because the AI companies were floundering and partly because those AI companies were starting to blame Lisp and its implementations for the failures of AI. One day in Spring 1989, I was sitting out on the Lucid porch with some of the hackers, and someone asked me why I thought people believed C and Unix were better than Lisp. I jokingly answered, "because, well, worse is better." We laughed over it for a while as I tried to make up an argument for why something clearly lousy could be good.