virtualeconomics

Yu Wan Mei?

Fellow Onion fans may be amused to see that the Onion has been sold to a Chinese "salvage fisheries and polymer injection" company.

Finally I understand why all their articles in my RSS feed for the past couple of days have been written in broken pidgin and dealt almost exclusively with Chinese sports stars being awesome.

And, like all the best satires, it's basically true. Where next for debt-burdened, credit-crunched newspapers but a harvesting strategy that cashes in reputations built up over the last century? Some are going online-only, some are finding vanity purchasers and others...well, others are going to disappear, or find foreign buyers, and those buyers are going to be people who think that influencing opinion in the US and Europe is worth sinking a few million dollars.

Hey eBuyer - we noticed that thing you do with the recorded message

I tried to buy a computer from eBuyer last week. I found that to be impossible but that's no big deal, the world is full of computer companies that can take down credit card details correctly at least once given three attempts so I'll use one of them instead. That's not the interesting thing about eBuyer.

The interesting thing about eBuyer is the recorded message when you're on hold. Here's how it goes.

(1) on getting into the queue, the message tells you there are anything between half a dozen and twenty people in the queue ahead, and estimates a waiting time

(2) as that waiting time counts down, the message comes back on to say that the number of people in the queue has fallen, and offers a fresh estimate

(3) sooner or later, the number of people in the queue apparently falls to one and the estimate falls to about a minute

(4) then - and this is the good bit - the wait goes on for another five minutes, without any further comment
from the seemingly-helpful countdown system.

One of three things is going on  here. One: on each of several occasions, the very last person in the queue takes five times longer to deal with than the people before them. It's not quite impossible, but it's so unlikely that we can discount it. Two: I am mad, or lying, or can't tell five minutes from 60 seconds. Possible, but I'm not buying it. Three: someone at eBuyer thought that no-one would notice if they made a recording that lies to you and tries to keep you on the phone as long as possible with a wholly spurious estimate of the wait remaining.

You know what? My money's on three. Try ringing eBuyer and see how credible those estimates sound to you. Five minutes, fine; three minutes, fine; two minutes, fine; and then finally one minute that in reality goes on for five more.

But why does Brian Pickle Lawn Mowers?

You'd be surprised how people make a living in my home town of Otley.

"Password too weak"? StumbleUpon must have a *lot* of inactive accounts

So I just tried to throw a link up on StumbleUpon to, you know, something cool I found on the Internet. Couldn't log in to my account (actually, can't remember ever creating one but hey, I must have at some point.) Create an account...fine. Go through the usual CAPTCHA bullshit...fine (I guess). Create a password. 

"Password is too weak". Well, maybe. It's an unguessable string of non-word letters but whatever. I substitute some numbers for letters. "Password is too weak". Still? OK, got a solution for that common obstacle too. I switch an "a" for an ampersand.

"Password can only contain numbers and letters".

WTF?

As far as I can work out, the only way to get a password that meets StumbleUpon's fairly unusual "strength" requirement is to arbitrarily uppercase some of the letters. So I do that. Now I have a password I'll never, ever remember, and suddenly I realise why logging on didn't work in the first place. I needed a password, that couldn't contain anything except numbers or letters, that was stronger than a meaningless string of numbers and letters. It reminds me of nothing so much as a line from the Simpsons - "I want all my groceries in one bag, but I don't want that bag to be heavy". Quite.

I wonder how many dead StumbeUpon accounts I've created and then been unable to get back in to in the past? Must be quite a few. Can't just be me. And why would I even care if someone went to the trouble of hacking my (now necessarilly one-time) StumbleUpon account anyway?

Ad targetting error #145,772

Here's an article from satirical online newspaper Daily Mash which, frankly, takes the piss out of muslims by reporting a call by by President Sarkozy for sexier burkas. Rather wonderfully, the ad-targeting software accompanies this with a Clickmuslim dating MPU and and a Google ad for TheHijabShop.com...

   

Pig chimney

Incidentally the forecasts I've seen for the economic consequences of a swine flu pandemic appear to grossly understate the likely impact on business. In the event that 100,000 people a day fall genuinely ill over August anyone who fancies an extra week off in the sunshine will simply claim to have gone down with swine flu too. (Try getting a sick-note out of the NHS during a swine flu pandemic - there will simply be no way to distinguish the genuinely sick from the malingerers.) 

Knock knock

Q: What happened when "almost all" news websites charged for their content?
A: People visited the other ones.

Boom boom.

(What do you mean it's not a joke?)

Post Rapture Pet Care

If you haven't seen Post Rapture Pets, or their competitors Post Rapture Pet Care, you really should. If everyone in this newly-found market really believes what they purport to believe, these guys should be raking it in - and it seems to be a big enough market to warrant at least two players, and there are apparently unaffiliated ads on Craigslist too.

(PS isn't it amazing that an apocalypse cult can struggle on for more than two thousand years and still, even now, be claiming that the apocalypse is just around the corner? Got to admire that sort of tenacity.)

More Local People sites launched today

Another day, another nine Local People sites rolled out - that brings us up to a total of 32 sites including my own beloved Otley site and now nine more across London and the South West. As before, if you're from any of these places or have friends there do pop along and say "hi"...

Marlborough, Wilts

Dalston, London

Wimborne, Dorset

Okehampton, Devon

Devonport, Plymouth

Quedgeley, Glos

Tavistock, Cornwall

Hedge End, Southampton

Lock's Heath, Southampton

 

Mencius on Wolfram Alpha

Since most mediatech people don't, I assume, read the uncategorisable but definitely fringey political musings of Mencius Moldbug over at Unqualified Reservations you probably won't spot when he comes up with an interesting point about mainstream consumer technology. But today he does. Here's Mencius on Wolfram Alpha:

"every decade since the '80s, billions of dollars and gazillions of man-hours have been invested in this fundamental error, to end routinely in disaster. It's as though the automotive industry had a large ongoing research program searching for the perpetual-motion engine.

The error is that control interfaces must not be intelligent. Briefly, intelligent user interfaces should be limited to applications in which the user does not expect to control the behavior of the product. If the product is used as a tool, its interface should be as unintelligent as possible. Stupid is predictable; predictable is learnable; learnable is usable.

I was reminded of this lesson by a brief perusal of Wolfram Alpha, the hype machine's latest gift. Briefly: there is actually a useful tool inside Wolfram Alpha, which hopefully will be exposed someday. Unfortunately, this would require Stephen Wolfram to amputate what he thinks is the beautiful part of the system, and leave what he thinks is the boring part.

WA is two things: a set of specialized, hand-built databases and data visualization apps, each of which would be cool, the set of which almost deserves the hype; and an intelligent UI, which translates an unstructured natural-language query into a call to one of these tools. The apps are useful and fine and good. The natural-language UI is a monstrous encumbrance, which needs to be taken out back and shot. It won't be."

(Oh, is he actually right? Partly. The big trick with Google isn't that the search technology is especially smart - although is is - but that it has been positioned as a source of definitive knowledge. Google is no such thing - it is a probabilistic system. At best it is only probably right. But humans aren't wired to trust probabilistic systems, so pitching Google as a source of definitive knowledge is way, way smarter than merely programming the thing to - probably - be right all the time. Wolfram isn't pitched as anything of the sort. It looks and feels and most crucially is described and therefore thought of as something that's pretty smart. "Pretty smart" is a nice parlour trick for a computer to pull off. But that's about all you can say for it.)