brianstorms

I signed up as a Seller on Amazon a while back, with one primary goal: sell extra copies of my book, published by Pantheon Books in 2017. The publisher offered me boxes of them at dirt-cheap prices and I took them up on their offer. So I started selling on Amazon, and I set my price as the lowest possible for "New" condition hardcover.

For a while my price got listed on the main book product page. Only briefly though. Then it disappeared, and another seller got the glory of the link for a "New" 3rd party seller, and their price was HIGHER than mine.

Amazon does not want to advertise your price if you are too low for their liking...

Suddenly, in July, my mom dies. I have to travel to the east coast for the funeral, etc., so I put a hold on the one and only item in my inventory -- my book. Effectively this takes me offline temporarily as an Amazon Seller which was fine.

BUT . . . when i get back home, I try to re-activate the account and find I cannot. INSTEAD, I get this notice from Amazon that my account is suspended, and that it's mandatory I go watch all these training videos about COUNTERFEIT products, how to spot them, why not to sell them, why it's illegal, etc, and that I do not have permission to sell counterfeit "Pantheon products." And I'm like, WTF? I'm selling the real deal, from Pantheon, and I AM THE EFFING AUTHOR AND THESE ARE MY OWN BOOKS.

I try to communicate with Amazon Seller Program and get nowhere (I think they deliberately hire only people who don't understand English). They refuse to explain anything about this absurd counterfeit stuff.

So I contact Pantheon. They just laugh. They had nothing to do with it, but weren't surprised -- they kind of hate Amazon.

THEN I get a new notice from Amazon that my account is disabled permanently due to lack of use.

WTF!?

So: here is my theory. They were pissed I had a super-low price, and when they saw me temporarily disable my inventory as I'd be away for a week for a funeral, they swept in and shut me down, with some kind of made-up lie about COUNTERFEIT (I mean, can you believe these guys!?). And nothing is resolved, and we're on the verge of October.

Amazon sucks.

I figure the day's coming when cops will be able to remotely activate the inside camera and microphone in a Tesla, or remotely disable the car and/or have it pull over, etc. Perhaps first in China, but probably everywhere eventually.

I sometimes suspect what's really going on with Tesla is that they want to become the world's manufacturer of EVs of all sorts, utility-scale energy storage systems, and software for EVs including ADAS.

Musk has said it: "the factory is the product." I kinda wonder if the real goal is, as the legacy OEMs quake, rattle, flail around begging for government handouts, and start to fail, Tesla knocks on their door and says "hey we can build your cars for you, with your brand on them, using our charging standard, our batteries, and our software. Just sign here."

Also, humans and other animals that rely on vision have eyelids and tear ducts and are able to blink and get stuff out of an eye.

Poor, poor Tesla cameras freak out as soon as the sunshine is too bright or there's snow or rain or ice or mud in the way. You'd think if they're going to rely on vision, every camera mounted on the car would have a way to "squint" in blinding-light conditions, or "wipe" the lens or something when smudges, rain, snow, ice, mud, or bug-splat blocks the view. But then, Tesla is insanely cheap, and all that would require parts, and that would impact margins, and that would impact stock price, and so, this is why we can't have nice things ....

Oh phooey. It's a longstanding joke that the "Don't Walk" lights don't change to "Walk" any sooner if you press the button. Just like the "close door" button in elevators doesn't make the doors close any sooner than they normally would.

Have been a Netflix customer since about 2000. I used to blog about them all the time in 2000-2001, did full writeups on their UI design, even the red envelope design. Had a dialog going to Neil Hunt their CTO/product guy. Even visited Netflix and had lunch with him once over the blog posts. I'd say they made about half the changes I urged them to make. Which was fun to see, that it made a difference.

As for their recommendation system: I always found it to be abysmal and worthless. It recommended films in genres I had never watched, had no interest in, like children's films, sports films, other niche genres. So as an experiment I started rating films Netflix would recommend in those genres to me, as having 1 out of 5 stars, the lowest rating you could give. [At some point they added "Not Interested" and I'd give it that rating. Ha! It was about as effective as pressing a pedestrian walk button at an intersection.]

I did this for months. Any spare time I had while waiting for something else to get done, I'd pop into Netflix and rate rate rate. Got really good at it. Kept doing it for more months. Eventually I rated over 20,000 movies, all in genres I had absolutely zero interest in ever watching anything in.

It made no difference. Netflix still recommended films in all kinds of genres, regardless of even if I had rated EVERY TITLE IN THAT GENRE as "Not Interested" or 1 out of 5 stars.

I once got on an elevator with Reed Hastings at a conference. As we rode the elevator I told him the story. He was ROTFL by the end. Laughter but as in a "too bad for you, I could care less" kind of way. He said no way they would not fix anything. He absolutely did not care whatsoever that Netflix recommended movies at the genre level when I absolutely hated the genre.

It was quite revealing, his "I couldn't care less" reaction.

History doesn't quite work as nicely as one might like. Fact is, dozens, probably hundreds, maybe thousands, of PLATO people wound up working in the tech industry, had long careers there at DEC, Data General, Sun Microsystems, Atari, Oracle, Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc etc etc etc.

The last section of my book documents some of the influences, including the most obvious one, Ray Ozzie's Iris project which created Lotus Notes, named after PLATO Notes. Lotus Notes had like 100 million users and was sold to IBM for billions of dollars. It had a huge influence on the corporate IT world.

And AuthorWare was developed by PLATO people, and got merged with Macromind, creating MacroMedia, which was ultimately gobbled up for billions by Adobe.

There's a lot of influence, but there's 100000x more noise and other stuff since, so it's buried and therefore the normal conclusion is "oh, there's no evidence so there was no impact" but that's too easy to dismiss... there's lots of impact, and PLATO people went everywhere, including me, doing a bunch of startups all of which were influenced by PLATO in one or more ways

brian dear / orange07 / pea.... homelink customer too... it was crazy expensive. But then I wound up with two physical PLATO terminals at home, and I was dialing in to CERL for all the fun and games, and to umbc for work

Always wanted to get out to Western Australia and Perth... still hope to visit some day. I have a video somewhere still of Don Bitzer's PLATO demo/presentation that he gave there in 1976 which was aired nationally on ABC in Australia.

Steve Nord! Nice to see youhere....

I interviewed a number of CS profs who worked at DCL in the 60s/70s/80s including H George Friedman, who was one of the few CS dept people who gave PLATO a try and built lessons for his programming students. Also, a full BASIC emulator was written. I think a FORTRAN was too. And definitely a LOGO environment. But as George told me, DCL looked down on CERL. DCL was an IBM shop. CERL was a CDC/CYBER shop. Oil and water.

And it's not about PLATO trying to "gain acceptance" at DCL. Other than George and maybe one or two other profs, nobody was interested. And CERL had its hands full with departments all over campus, and over 1000 terminals all over campus and as far away as Hawaii and Delaware, using the system.

I'm not going to engage anymore with you. I've said my piece and we're done. Good day to you.

Who cares about the Internet. (I'm on internet-history... it's a bunch of aging farts, very distinguished and nice aging farts but still, talking about TCP/IP and who did email and who did this and when did that happen etc. That's all swell. My book was not about the Internet. It was about PLATO and from a larger perspective, the rise of cyberculture of which "internet" only a portion.)

DCL like the Education dept at UIUC pooh-poohed PLATO from the outset. So it's no wonder they had a snooty attitude (and still do) about PLATO. MIT and Stanford had the same snooty attitue. PLATO was electrical engineering-driven, and science and humanities-driven. Very unusual for such a project, but that was the way it was.

Also, my book wasn't about the impact PLATO had on the University, but on cyberculture. The University politicians gladly swept PLATO under the carpet as soon as they could as the NCSA got big money in the 80s, and then the web took off in the 90s. Today it's like PLATO never existed at UIUC. A lot of that is due to decisions the PLATO lab took to stick to clearly antiquated design decisions and a reluctance to embrace client/server and distributed-computing designs. But they had to stick to old ways, because they had an immediate need to deploy, they weren't an ivory tower think tank like Xerox PARC dreaming up what the future might look like in 20 years. PLATO folks were dreaming up the then-present, and they shipped, like any good startup.

What I wanted to do was a film documentary. What stopped me was, there was no footage! Meaning, nobody at CERL, the PLATO lab at U Illinois, had filmed everything. Nobody was a movie camera nerd. Nobody captured all the historical events, or even just day to day meetings / demos. It wasn't that kind of lab: everyone was insanely focused on the work at hand, and the culture was never one to expend any cycles on documenting how things went along the way. So there's a paper record, but very little in the way of footage. And if you do a documentary feature film you need TONS TONS TONS of video and film footage.

I did consider a website but ugh, it limits the audience. It doesn't get into bookstores. It doesn't get on college syllabi. You gotta do a book. So I did a book.

As for big financial loss, I knew going into the project I'd never make back what I put into the project over ~30 years. I didn't care; that wasn't the goal. The goal was to capture the story while the criticial mass of key PLATO people were still alive, and then put that into print so the world would know about PLATO before it all disappeared--believe me, the Silicon Valley tech industry would be perfectly happy if PLATO had disappeared. It messes so much with their mythology, after all! So that was a big motivator. The book has done fairly well, actually, and continues to sell in hardcover, paperback, and audiobook editions.

yo, Brand! nice to see you here!!!

Stig was a cool guy, RIP.

I'm the author of The Friendly Orange Glow. I agree the book skips across the surface.

Some backstory: I originally proposed three volumes, each 1000 pages, to the publisher. They laughed and told me absolutely no. My thinking was, PLATO as a topic needs to be approached the way Robert Caro approached Lyndon Johnson. It's going to need multiple 1000-page books.

The publisher's reaction to my proposal was laughter. Their deal was, one book, 150,000 words, take it or leave it. So I took it: I'd spent 30+ years working on the project, had accumulated some 7 million words of interview transcripts, and had to get it out. In the end I delivered 229,000 words to the publisher which even then was the result of painful and severe chopping out of not only major sections but even entire chapters--all kinds of history got removed from the manuscript. (By the way, the final book came out to 209,000 words. Publisher was pissed that it wasn't 150,000. Editor, god bless him, stood by me, and we shipped 209,000 words. Publisher, I firmly believe, punished me by listing the book at a $40.00 list price, which is instant market death for a hardcover book in 2017. Powell's refused to let me do a book event because they don't allow $40 books to be presented by authors. It was sabotage, in my opinion. The publisher did atrocious, half-hearted work at publicity. They sent seven copies to people at the New York Times, which did nothing and never reviewed it. Nor did WPost. Nor did LA Times. Or SF Chronicle. Or Boston Globe, etc, etc. Only Wall Street Journal reviewed it, and they gave it a glowing review.

But here's the thing... anyone who knew and used PLATO is going to have their pet topics and focus areas, and complain about topics the book did include that are not favorites to them personally. Trust me, I've heard from thousands of PLATO people and everybody's happy and unhappy at the same time with what is in, and what is not in, the book. But I didn't write the book for PLATO people. I wrote it for the 8 billion people on Earth who'd never heard of PLATO and who were likely to never hear of it and its significance if something didn't get published that triggered PLATO to finally enter the conversation.

And look what's happening: Y Combinator's Hacker News is talking about PLATO! Ars of all things is talking about PLATO! In the past 5 years, Slate and WIRED (who always hated PLATO and refused to mention it) talked about PLATO. Verge and Motherboard covered it. PLATO is now a part of the conversation. Mission accomplished.

Finally: If you want to get a copy and read The Friendly Orange Glow, you can buy a hardcover from me directly by going to the Amazon site's hardcover page for the book, and selecting a "New" copy from seller Birdrock Books. That's me. I'm selling new copies for $11.11. Brand new, out of the box from the publisher. They come from me, with my signature on it.

Nice planet you're on. Not Earth, though.

The law is exactly why we were not able to get local service here in NM.

We did present it to the legislators that way. They didn't care. The way it works is, the lobbyists for the dealers go and meet with the legislators behind closed doors or in the hallways of the Roundhouse (NM State Capitol) and they tell them not to vote yes on a bill in committee. They provide a few talking points as to why. Usually these legislators already take money from the lobbyists. (Dealers give like half a million a year to the legislators' campaigns; it's all disclosed.) So by the time the committee has its hearing, the votes are already decided. The whole "debate" and the testimony from witnesses is largely theatre. You wind up with anti-Tesla legislators all rattling off the verbatim talking points of the dealers, as if the whole thing is scripted. We pointed out that Tesla has no franchisees so how does this law apply, etc. Doesn't matter. Falls on deaf ears. They're already bought. Their mind is made up.

Study economics. Tesla owners in New Mexico acted in our own self-interest. We pushed and pushed and leaned hard on Tesla, the legislature, the dealers, for six years, so WE would have a nearby in-state service center so we wouldn't have to drive 400 miles and spend a lot of money on hotels and eating out while our cars were fixed in Phoenix, El Paso, or Denver. Now, please run along and get back to your antivax freedumb rally and I'll keep being a sheeple.

Some background on this story that you won't get from the media.

On August 23, 2015, I founded the Tesla Owners Club of New Mexico, with one purpose: fight for a change in the state law that protects the franchise dealer monopoly on sales and service in New Mexico. Six days later, on the 29th, we held our first meetup event, at the Jinja restaurant in Santa Fe. 12 people attended; we all sat around a long group of tables that the restaurant had pushed together.

The 12 of us discussed the law, how we could get it changed, and during the conversation the idea of "well why doesn't Tesla just put a service center and store on tribal land?" That idea was so brilliant, I was so excited by it, I quickly reached out to Tesla to schedule a call with the corporate development and policy people at the company. That led to multiple long calls over a few weeks, and then Tesla suggested I do some research on the idea. So I wrote up a report with maps, photos, etc of various locations that seemed to make sense from an owner's perspective, and submitted it to the company. The company kind of stewed on it but decided to continue to pursue the legislative fight.

So for the next four years I worked with Tesla, and many many state senators and state representatives to push for bills that would change the restrictive, protectionist laws and enable--hasten, really--the adoption of electric vehicles by companies like Tesla which did not use franchise dealerships. We held hearings, we had committee meetings, we had club members show up for events, offer legislators rides in our cars, we tried everything. But by 2019 it was clear there was just too much political pressure on the state government from the dealers and other interests like Big Oil, to get a bill through.

All along we owners continued to urge Tesla to look at the tribal alternative. They finally began to look into that. We were largely in the dark for the next two and a half years as Tesla canvassed the state for a tribal partner. They found one in the Nambe Pueblo. The result was announced yesterday.

Never again will Tesla owners in New Mexico have to plan indefinite hotel stays hundreds of miles away in other states while their car is serviced at some remote service location. Yesterday afternoon I used the app to schedule a long-deferred service appointment for my car (squeaks and other things) and the app showed the new local service center and I got an appointment! Yeah, baby. Never looking back.

p.s. The Tesla Owners Club of New Mexico now has 536 members and is growing fast. http://tocnm.org

Bartle inventing "MUD" is like the has-so-many-PhDs-guy who claims he invented "EMAIL".

Bartle was unaware of the PLATO system, which had numerous MUDs up and running and mature by the time his was released online.

CNBC from March 2021. Old FUD.

Have been an Amazon customer since 1996. Have signed up for Prime dozens of times -- for the free trials. I have never paid for it. I would never pay for it. Seems like a ripoff. In the early days they would warn you: if you end the trial you will never be allowed back into Prime. Heh. Then they would send you emails begging you to try it out again. So I would. Used it for "free" shipping. Over the years they added lots of other stuff like the movies/tv shows but the picture quality was lousy and they rarely if ever offered multichannel 5.1 audio. Another reason I have never paid for it.

Pro-tip in terms of naming: Calling it "Fediverse" is going to strike a lot of people as meaning "The Feds" not, I dunno, "federated". Gotta pick another name.

I'm confused by all the disclaimers regarding home ovens. WHY NOT a home oven, what is the scientific reason? I've been baking N95s on a tray in our kitchen oven at 170F for ~20-30 min and reusing. These articles seem to suggest that's a bad idea but do not say WHY. Would love to know WHY.

Problem is, it's nigh impossible for a tech company to "strike deals with all the theater chains," be they sweetheart or not so sweet. The movie theater biz is one of the most inept around, stuck in the 1950's in terms of its business model.

I did a tech startup that tried to bring social/mobile/local tech to the movie theater experience, and the theaters balked. They fear technology. It took a decade of fearmongering for theaters to fork over millions to buy digital projectors. The last thing they want is tech that will empower moviegoers.

What you discover with the "exhibition industry" (what theaters like to call themselves) is that they are in the fast-food business. Popcorn, soda, candy, junk food: this is what the theater sells. The movie is there just to bring you into the building. But what they want you to buy is the concessions. Without the movie nobody in the world would wander into a theater and order a popcorn and a soda for $12 or whatever.

When I spoke with exhibitors, I found them to be like realtors: really paranoid, untrusting of their competition, and particularly untrusting of uppity little tech startups (can't really blame 'em, I mean, if a tech startup ever gets successful they tend to wipe out everything in their wake--witness Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Craigslist, etc.)

Despite the fact that we had built an app that presented a compelling case for a $1 billion or higher bump in annual U.S. box office revenue--we basically came up with ways to get more people to go to more movies more often--the exhibitors would have none of it. They didn't trust it, they wanted nothing to do with it. ESPECIALLY if their competitors in the same city had the same tech. The idea of a mobile app that empowered moviegoers to get alerted to every moving coming, and track upcoming movies after you indicated you liked the trailer, and tracked your favorite stars/directors/etc, and tracked the reviews of your favorite critics, and tracked what your friends were planning to go see, none of that meant diddly to exhibitors.

It was the craziest thing I've ever seen.

The way theaters are trying to survive now is by focusing on what their core competence is: food. Notice how many theaters now sell hamburgers and pizza and sandwiches, and beer and wine, and so on. You go to a movie now, you may be set back for $30 in meal fees per person easily. For an exhibitor, that's nirvana.

Nah, MoviePass was doomed from day one.

You think that's something, you should see this documentary called CAVEDIGGER about a guy named Ra Paulette in New Mexico who carves exquisite caves for customers. It's really something. Watch the trailer: http://cavediggerdocumentary.com/

Indeed. There is an excellent film documentary by that very name that documents how they're starving public universities across the country and how some may go bankrupt soon.

The irony is, the Rs collectively are the beast, and if we were honest we'd see that their strategy is actually Feed the Beast all the way. Redirect public money to private profit.

I just rode the Southwest Chief from New Mexico to Illinois and back, last month.

Had a long talk with one of the conductors while on the trip. We discussed the remarkable pattern that the Republicans follow: starve everything they don't like (or that they want to privatize so they can pocket the money), then use the subsequent difficulties and failures and budget shortfalls of the starved agency as proof that the agency can't function and deserves being shut down. They do this with Amtrak, they do it with the State Department, they do it with public schools, they do it with state universities, with healthcare, with prisons, with everything they want to privatize.

Funny, they do this with minorities too. Systematically deny them, over many generations, a good education, decent healthcare, safe neighborhoods, ability to vote, and economic opportunity, and then blame them for being uneducated, unhealthy, unsafe, frauds during elections, and for not contributing to the overall economy. Funny how the Rs' playbook is the same everywhere you look.

As for Amtrak, all the transcontinental routes are in jeopardy, the conductor told me. It's only a matter of time before they're gone.

No other civilized country in the world has such lousy transportation infrastructure. Especially trains. The U.S. should have bullet trains going everywhere, but no.