Arnt Gulbrandsen
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Advertising-supported purchasing

Some things I buy from Amazon Marketplace seem to cost less than the cost of the envelope, postage and the labour of putting the thing into the envelope. Ten LR41 button cells for less than €1.

When that happens the envelope is invariably full of advertising.

There is something very appropriate about this. Advertising has nothing to do with my accompanying my daughter to school, so why should there be billboards along our route? But it has everything to do with buying things. And because of it, it's easy and cheap to get hold of odd cables, lightbulbs and whatnot.

I think I need a new pen.

Amazon Prime: The game

The Amazon Prime game is an odd kind of game: The players are Amazon and myself, but the winner is usually either DHL or UPS.

The rules are as follows: […More…]

Clueless in the cloud

What Amazon wrote:

We have noticed that one or more of your instances are running on a host degraded due to hardware failure. [...]

The host needs to undergo maintenance and will be taken down [...]

What Amazon might have written:

Thought you were clever, eh? Running that fancy Cassandra cluster? I bet you didn't expect your redundant copies on several Cassandra nodes to really be stored on the same crummy drive. […More…]

... the fact that ...

A sentence: Amazon, a big Net Neutrality advocate has come around to acknowledge the fact that it is reasonable for broadband service providers to sell premium service to broadband subscribers or content providers.

A question: Does the fact that ever mean anything other than in my opinion?