Jim Lipsey

I was on the fence regarding the wisdom of Amazon selling groceries. But there is little doubt regarding their new video download service, dubbed unbox. It’s positively bone-headed.

For $13.95 you can download a copy of Office Space (a terrific movie). This file can exist on at most two computer and comes with no other materials. If you wish to watch the film in the living room, your computer must be hooked up to your TV, which makes you highly atypical.

Suppose you want to bypass all the hassle and just purchase the DVD with free shipping. Well, that would cost you the same $13.95, for which you get actual media that can be played on any number of computers and DVD players, as well as packaging, etc.

Oh, and if you own a Mac, as we plan to shortly, you’re just plain out of luck.

update:Tom Merritt finds that not only does unbox run every time Windows starts, it also establishes a Windows service that runs in the background and phones home quite a bit, a no-no that many will consider tantamount to spyware. Neither of these annoyances can be disabled through the software’s preferences, and uninstalling it was a cumbersome chore that required logging in to his Amazon account. It looks like unbox is headed for the same fate as Flexplay.

I identified the use of mascots to be The Next Big Thing in retail marketing pretty early on, and even photographed representative examples while commuting. Other futurists have been talking about the potential effects of VOIP and bio-tech on our culture, but they all missed this one.

How do we know that silly costumes have caught on as a sales device?

They’re being outlawed.

I’m a big fan of Amazon.com, having been a customer since Jeff Bezos sold books out of his closet¹. They pioneered a lot in the early days of online commerce, including publishing customer reviews of individual products. The availability of unflinching feedback for every item Amazon sells proved to add more value to their business than sales lost to the exposure of a few lemons among their offerings. It was revolutionary at the time, and brick and mortar stores are still trying to catch up.

But what happens when Amazon expands this system to include a new product category composed almost exclusively of commodity products like groceries? The answer appears to be 546 reviews of a one gallon jug of milk.

All of them hilarious.

1. okay, not really, but almost that long ↩

Here’s how I think the whole thing played out.

Barney goes to K9 boot camp with a bunch of other dogs who are sent off to chase down drug smugglers and battle terrorism while he ends up guarding teddy bears in an obscure London museum. So naturally, one day he snaps.

Barney ripped the head off a brown stuffed bear once owned by the young [Elvis] Presley during the attack, leaving fluffy stuffing and bits of bears’ limbs and heads on the museum floor.

update - After finding this photo of Barney, I’m ready to adopt him. We’re already pretty good at handling charges that are inclined toward an occasional messy public outburst.

Presenting the debut television performance of Zakary and Wynston. If you stayed up late watching HGTV on digital cable last month (and who hasn’t), you may have already seen it. W&Z share the role of ‘Toddler’. As an added bonus, look for a special cameo toward the end. While the Lipsey munchkins were naturals for this gig, landing the job had a little bit to do with me working for the company that designed the world’s first flushable toddler urinal. So I guess we all have a claim to fame.

The Cubs let Greg Maddux go to the Braves during free agency in 1992. There are few dumber things they’ve ever done, which is saying something. But this is not a team content to fail. They must fail spectacularly. So it’s unsurprising that after getting Maddux back in 2004 and seeing him pitch consistently well since then¹, they traded him today to the Los Angeles Dodgers.

1. His 9-11 record this season is in spite of pitching for the team with the least number of runs scored in baseball, and yes, I’m including the Kansas City Royals. ↩

GMail does a pretty good job identifying spam. The offending messages are slotted into a ‘Spam’ folder, where they sit for 30 days before being deleted automatically.

If you’re a compulsive person (like me), this produces an obsessive need to check the spam box four or five times a day to look for false positives and delete everything else. In the year I’ve used GMail, the total number of messages incorrectly marked as spam by the sytem has been one, and even it wasn’t very important.

Continue reading ‘Ignoring Spam’

They’ve definitely got chutzpah. Here’s a site whose business model is to facilitate payola between companies and bloggers. Reaction has not been positive (in the article or its trackbacks). I predict bloggers will add ‘I don’t take payola’ badges to the countless other icons and graphics that are clogging up sidebars everywhere. Here’s my attempt:

I just added Unusual Business Ideas That Work to my slowly-growing blogroll. It’s a site that profiles oddball ideas that ended up being wildly successful, like the guy who sends mail from Santa Claus, or folks who sell t-shirts. While the business concepts draw our attention for being quirky, the recurring theme in all these cases appears to be that success came not from the original idea, but from great execution. This point is often missed. Too much importance is given to a new product idea rather than how to turn it into a success. Fearful of being ripped off, private inventors and aspiring entrepreneurs will zealously guard their innovations, doing so in a manner that prohibits forming partnerships or advancing development of their idea.

Unfortunately, this tendency toward being over-cautious may only going get worse with the emergence of institutional patent trolls.

Vince Adams asks “Should Analysis Be Left to the Specialists?”, and decides that designers shouldn’t be afraid perform Finite Element Analysis (FEA) in their development efforts. People who specialize in FEA tend to take the opposite position (see this discussion) - that FEA is a specialized science that impacts product safety and should be left to the experts. Generally, I think Vince makes a strong case, but one thing troubles me in his argument:

What is the real danger of a less knowledgeable user doing their own FEA? … [The] only real danger, in nearly all companies who don’t employ analysis specialists, is lost time in the process as work is spent doing analysis that might not yield any useful information.

The problem isn’t that the information might not be useful.  Rather, the information can be completely wrong.  COSMOSWorks is a terrific package.  It makes FEA very easy, and seemingly for that reason alone, is sometimes dismissed by FEA superanalysts.  They couldn’t be more mistaken.  A quality analysis no longer requires hours or days of tweaking meshes and entering constraints through an incredibly unintuitive interface.   This barrier to entry alone has helped many sub-par FEA jockies maintain a cushy existance.  But the fundamental rule of FEA is that the results are only as good as the model.  COSMOSWorks will help you set up and run an analysis in minutes, but if things aren’t set up intelligently, it will much prefer to generate results that are far removed from reality than provide no answers at all.  The problem is compounded by its beautiful outcome renderings that make whatever result is being displayed seem definitively correct.

FEA requires a basic understanding of all the components of good analysis, including geometry simplification, proper meshing, application of restraints and loads, mesh convergence and data interpretation.  This doesn’t mean FEA should be left to the experts, but companies who incorporate it into their designers’ functions should make sure they have the basic skills to do a proper job and enough sense to know when to call in the experts.  SolidWorks’ two day Intro to COSMOSWorks course does a pretty good job at this.