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How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy on Amazon

February 23, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Then another bot piled on, and then one based in the UK. They started competing with each other on price. Pretty soon they were offering my book below the retail price, and trying to make up the difference on “shipping and handling”. I was getting a bit worried.

The punchline is that Amazon itself is a bot that does price-matching. Soon after the marketplace bot’s race to the bottom, it decided to put my book on sale! 28% off. I can’t wait to find out what that does to my margin. (Update: nothing, it turns out. Amazon is eating the entire discount. This is a pleasant surprise.)

(Full Story: How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy on Amazon)

amazon
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With Many Eyeballs, All Bugs Are Shallow | open source

February 23, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

A new report from the Coverity Scan project today indicates that a great many people do know what to look for, and open source software is at least on par if not better than proprietary software with respect to software defects. The Coverity Scan project evaluated selected open source projects and a number of anonymous proprietary codebases to identify “hard-to-spot, yet potentially crash-causing defects.” The results reinforce Linus’ Law.

According to Coverity, within the software industry as a whole a defect density of 1.0 is the average. As you can see from Coverity’s findings, the Linux 2.6 kernel, PHP 5.3, and PostgreSQL 9.1 all have signficantly smaller defect densities.

(Full Story: With Many Eyeballs, All Bugs Are Shallow | open source)

opensource
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Hiring: 3 Ways to Look Beyond the Resume

February 22, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

# Flexibility
# Accountability/Responsibility
# Entrepreneurial Spirit
# Innovative Outlook
# Drive

(Full Story: Hiring: 3 Ways to Look Beyond the Resume)

hiring

Mikko Hypponen: Three types of online attack – TED

February 22, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Cybercrime expert Mikko Hypponen talks us through three types of online attack on our privacy and data — and only two are considered crimes. “Do we blindly trust any future government? Because any right we give away, we give away for good.”

As computer access expands, Mikko Hypponen asks: What’s the next killer virus, and will the world be able to cope with it?

(Full Story: Mikko Hypponen: Three types of online attack – TED)

security
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PubNub: Push Real-time Data to Mobile, Tablet, Web

February 22, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

PubNub is a cloud-hosted data network for building real-time web and mobile applications at scale.

(Full Story: PubNub: Push Real-time Data to Mobile, Tablet, Web)

pubsub, push, saas
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Zucchini – an iOS testing framework

February 22, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

A Zucchini feature file consists of sections bound to contexts of different application screens. Every screen you proceed to needs to be backed up by a CoffeeScript class describing all UI elements you want Zucchini to interact with as well as custom actions you feel like performing on that screen.

(Full Story: Zucchini – an iOS testing framework)

ios, mobile, testing
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devopsanywhere: Puppet vs. Chef, Fight!

February 22, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Chef wins but by only a narrow margin.

The Criteria

Community Strength
Leadership
Corporate Adoption
Technical Merits
Hands-on Experience

(Full Story: devopsanywhere: Puppet vs. Chef, Fight!)

puppet, scm
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Under the hood: HTML5 or native? A CNET guide

February 22, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

In summary, when discussing your mobile strategy, use the type of traffic your site has to determine whether to use HTML5 mobile Web or native apps, and then use your level of budget to decide whether to go turnkey or custom.

(Full Story: Under the hood: HTML5 or native? A CNET guide)

android, html5, ios, mobile
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How Much Would Debian Cost to Develop? How About $19 Billion?

February 22, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

The developer version of Debian GNU/Linux (“wheezy”) contains 17,141 packages of software, or 419,776,604 lines of code. With that figure, James Bromberger estimates that Debian would cost about $19.1 billion to produce. Bromberger also looks at the cost of individual projects like PHP, Apache and MySQL. Even at more than $19 billion, the figure is likely far short of what it would actually cost to produce.

(Full Story: How Much Would Debian Cost to Develop? How About $19 Billion?)

mysql, apache, linux, opensource
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Amazon AWS Simple Workflow Service

February 22, 2012 by Brent Sordyl 0 Comments

Often an application consists of several different tasks to be performed in particular sequence driven by a set of dynamic conditions. Amazon SWF makes it very easy for developers to architect and implement these tasks, run them in the cloud or on premise and coordinate their flow. Amazon SWF manages the execution flow such that the tasks are load balanced across the registered workers, that inter-task dependencies are respected, that concurrency is handled appropriately and that child workflows are executed.

(Full Story: Amazon AWS Simple Workflow Service)

aws, workflow
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