Month: August 2005

What do Amazon’s rankings really mean?

Chris Anderson, in the process of writing The Long Tail, is highly motivated to learn exactly what Amazon.com’s sales ranking numbers mean. Today’s post on the subject is fascinating:

Amazon still isn’t releasing the hard numbers, but we do at least have a bit more experience at reverse-engineering them. A number of other academics have taken a stab at it since then, as well as some independent experts.

I asked one of them, Morris Rosenthal of Foner Books, to extend the analysis he’s done over the past two years on correlating Amazon sales rank to absolute sales and apply that approach to the Long Tail. Fortunately, he took to the project with a vengeance and has built the beginning of what may be the best analytical framework for estimating Amazon’s sales yet.

If you’re interested in how someone reverse-engineers the workings of Amazon, read Rosenthal’s excerpt at the end of the post. It’s fascinating.

I choose science

My forehead is slightly flatter today than it was yesterday. That’s because of the time I spent pounding it against my desktop last night when I learned that the President of the United States thinks that it makes perfect sense to combine science classes with folklore and mythology instead of having them in separate buildings. Tom Burka had the best perspective I’ve seen on the issue:

The White House announced today that President Bush would henceforth determine the scientific curriculum to be taught in America’s schools. The announcement came immediately after Bush endorsed the teaching of intelligent design.

President Bush apparently wants to adopt a modified pre-Copernican view of astronomy, to start. “This whole notion that the universe does not revolve around our great nation, our great planet, seems kind of crazy,” he told reporters yesterday.

Bush was also skeptical about what he called “the notion of gravity.” “I’m uncomfortable with teaching our children that bodies are attracted to each other,” he said. “That seems like an unwholesome idea to put into children’s heads, don’t it?” He speculated that objects fall to the ground because “God wants them to.”

Maybe we should all suggest appropriate additions to our local school curriculums. For instance, instead of teaching high school students about how modern manufacturing systems work, why not provide this alternate explanation?

Also, in next year’s Federal budget, I want to see R&D funding for alternate energy systems based on dilithium crystals. Scotty would’ve wanted it.

Hello, Bloglines? Tap, tap, tap. Anyone there?

According to Feedburner, 1217 people are subscribed to this site via RSS (thank you very much!). Of that number, 328 use Bloglines. Unfortunately, you Bloglines users are getting a subpar experience, because Bloglines regularly, for no apparent reason, decides to stop picking up this feed. In fact, if you read this site via Bloglines, you probably think I haven’t posted anything since yesterday at 1:37 pm (MDT), even though this is post #4 since that time. I have no idea when you will actually see this post

Bloglines seems to do this regularly. As Feedburner recommended, I sent an e-mail to Bloglines Support asking them to please kick-start my feed, but I really shouldn’t have to do that.

Is anyone at Bloglines listening? This seems to be a downward spiral in quality. Is it growing pains? Was being acquired by Ask Jeeves a bad deal for Bloglines users? Is the fact that Bloglines is now a tiny cog in the giant IAC/InterActive Corp. relevant to this discussion? Any other folks with Bloglines stories to tell?

New templates coming for SharePoint

Mary Jo Foley has details about a new set of templates that just arrived for SharePoint Services, the collaboration technology built into Windows Server 2003:

On Tuesday, Microsoft quietly rolled out 30 free, downloadable applications that build on top of the company’s SharePoint Services collaboration/workflow technology that is built into Windows Server.

Among the plethora new applications are horizontal and vertical applets both. Schedule-management, consumer-financing, employee-training, event-management, travel-request, classroom-management, campaign-management and other similar types of offerings are available immediately.

I noticed the full collection had appeared on the Microsoft Downloads server yesterday. This one caught my eye, for instance:

The Competitive Intelligence (CI) Dashboard application for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services is designed to improve organization of CI-related materials, and communication about competitive issues among sales, public relations, marketing, product or service management, and executive personnel.

I’ve used SharePoint for a couple of years, and it’s been an indispensable tool for collaboriting with my co-authors, editors, and production folks in the process of putting together books for Microsoft Press. You don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company either; even a group of two or three people can benefit from the features in SharePoint. It’s a huge improvement over the alternative most people use, which is to share files and lists via e-mail. (And Windows Small Business Server 2003, which is very affordable, includes all the SharePoint features you need.)

With templates like these, the process of creating a SharePoint site literally takes a few clicks. It’s worth checking out.

In search of awesome external storage

If I’m going to be a charter member of the Terabyte Lifestyle club, I should probably get organized about it. Which is why I’ve been looking around at external hard drive enclosures lately. I’ve used IDE drives in external USB 2.0 drives for years with generally excellent results, but I know I can kick performance and reliability up dramatically by switching from USB to direct SATA connections. The new PC (which is scheduled to arrive Saturday) has four internal SATA adapters, of which two will be connected to internal SATA drives. I can use an adapter like this one or this one to make the internal adapters accessible to individual external devices. But I’d rather have a single box that holds four or five SATA drives in a RAID array that can then plug into a SATA RAID controller.

The StorCase InfoStation is one option. It uses removable drive trays that can be hot-swapped. It even supports SATA II drives. But at $1000+ not including drives, it doesn’t fit my budget.

The TeraByte HotDrive 1TB, at $999 including drives, makes more sense. I’m leery that I can’t find a data sheet, though. Has anyone tried this device? Anyone from Evergreen Technologies want to contact me offline?

Any other suggestions for products designed for storage fanatics?

Update: The PC Doctor suggests LaCie’s Biggest F800 1TB. It didn’t make the short list because 1) it uses IDE drives, not SATA; 2) Thomas Hawk has scared me off the LaCie drives with his experience (although I still think he’s got a separate hardware issue); and 3) at $1499, it’s too expensive!

Tip of the day: Keep a clean desktop

Most people find it convenient to dump icons on the Windows desktop for easier access. Files, program shortcuts, downloads, Internet shortcuts. I have five folders and 23 individual icons on my desktop, and I suspect that’s less than average.

The trouble with all those icons is they’re hard to get to – whatever you’re working with covers up the desktop – and they cover up the photo that you use as a desktop background. Here’s a strategy I use to make things neater:

  1. Create a shortcut to the Desktop. Yes, the desktop is just a folder with a few special attributes. Right-click any empty space on the desktop and choose New, Shortcut. In the location box, type %userprofile%\Desktop (be sure to include the percent signs) and click Next. In the next step, you should see Desktop already filled in as the title of the shortcut. Click Finish.
  2. Add your new Desktop shortcut to the Start menu. Drag the Desktop shortcut icon you just created over the Start button – but don’t release the mouse button yet. When the Start menu appears, move the shortcut up to the top, just below the shortcuts for your Web browser and e-mail program. Now release the mouse button to drop the shortcut into position. (If you miss, you can drag it up or down into any position.)
  3. Hide all icons on the desktop. In Windows XP, right-click any empty space on the desktop and choose Arrange Icons By. Click the Show Desktop Icons menu option to remove the checkmark. Within a few seconds, your desktop will be completely clean and uncluttered.

To access any of the icons on your desktop, click the Desktop shortcut you created on the Start menu. You might want to organize the Desktop folder a little more, with a subfolder for program shortcuts, another for Downloads, and so on

Why some people get Windows CDs and some don’t

Following up on my earlier post about how Dell and HP make it difficult for customers to get a real Windows CD with their new PC…

I went back and read a post I put together back in February (Everything you always wanted to know about Windows Product Activation), and found a few relevant details. If you buy a new PC with Windows preinstalled from your local white-box builder, he or she is required to give you a CD, a product key, and a certificate of authenticity. But if the PC maker is a Royalty OEM – a category that includes the 20 largest PC makers in the world, such as Dell, HP, Sony, and IBM – the requirements are different:

Royalty OEMs receive a ‘golden master’ copy of Windows from Microsoft. The royalty OEM may customize Windows as described in the OPK, their license agreement, or a signed addendum… These OEMs obtain all customized media, end-user manuals, and bulk quantities of COA stickers from MS authorized replicators.

Royalty OEMs may provide recovery media for each computer, and that media must be protected so that it can be used only on that particular computer. Both printed books and any recovery media display the OEM name and branding.

The big companies get to play by a different set of rules, and the customers sometimes come out on the short end of the stick. If you’re thinking of buying a new PC running Windows, make sure it comes with a real CD, not some bogus recovery disk or partition. The CD is a crucial troubleshooting and repair tool; when (not if) you have a disk failure or another type of emergency that requires you to repair Windows, you’ll need that CD.

Hidden partition vs. a real Windows CD

Hewlett-Packard has agreed to provide real Windows CDs to its customers instead of hiding the Windows files in a recovery partition, Engadget reports this morning:

If you’re the owner of an HP PC purchased over the past few years, you may just be in line for a free Windows XP recovery CD, based on the settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought against HP over, of all things, hidden recovery partitions and missing Windows XP directories. The main allegations in the case, which was settled without HP admitting any wrongdoing, were that HP included undisclosed recovery partitions on PC hard drives, and didn’t include the “ValueAdd” and “Support” folders that are included on standalone copies of XP.

The Engadget editors didn’t include a link (update – in the comments, Mark Orchant points out that the link is there, although it’s so cleverly hidden that no human being would ever find it), so I can’t track down the source of the story. As of this morning, MSN Money had nothing on this story, and neither did Yahoo! Finance.

Anyway, this is good news. If you use Windows XP, you should have a Windows CD. Period. (One good reason: In Windows XP Home Edition, the Windows Backup program is in the Support folder and isn’t installed by default. Backup is a good thing.)

Obligatory Dell reference: I noticed when pricing the latest Dell configurations last week that Dell will now sell home users a Windows CD. That’s right – if you want the CD, you have to pay an extra $10 for it. They’re shameless.

Dell_backup_cd

A brand-new Powertoy

The SyncToy v1 Beta is one of the best little free utilities I’ve ever seen from Microsoft:

SyncToy is a free PowerToy for Microsoft Windows XP that provides is an easy to use, highly customizable program that helps users to do the heavy lifting involved with the copying, moving, and synchronization of different directories. Most common operations can be performed with just a few clicks of the mouse, and additional customization is available without adding complexity. SyncToy can manage multiple sets of directories at the same time; it can combine files from two folders in one case, and mimic renames and deletes in another. Unlike other applications, SyncToy keeps track of renames to files and will make sure those changes get carried over to the synchronized folder.

I’ll have a lot more to say about this later, after I’ve played with it for a while.