mediajunk

A California-based man is suing eBay for allegedly using "shill" bidding against him to force up the price of the item he was buying and (by proxy) to increase its fees.

According to The Register:

Glenn Block claims his bid for a Xerox Copy Cartridge was increased from $111 to $112.5 despite the absence of any real competing bid. In another auction Block claims eBay's intervention raised his bid from $75 to $75.55.

Although the sums involved are only small, multiplied by eBay's huge customer base they could add up to millions of dollars.

Since trust is so important in the business model of the online auction giant, the negative publicity attached to the lawsuit will be most unwelcome. In its defence, eBay claims that the plaintiff "completely misunderstands the functionality of the eBay bidding system".

This is most likely the case. Those who misunderstood Google's technology, for example, have in the past failed in their attempts to sue for breach of copyright, besmirching their good names, etc.

I remember reading an article back in 99 with the headline "How the Web Shrinks as it Grows". The basic idea was that despite more and more pages getting added to the internet, regular users are visiting fewer sites.

At the time I thought this was due to the high quality of those few sites, with good brands and updated content, etc. But now I think the search engines have a lot to do with it.

Despite there being eight billion plus pages on the web, I sometimes feel that I am watching a cheap cartoon, where the background (the same sites) get repeated again and again. I know there is much more information out there, so why do I keep finding myself on sites and thinking "oh, this one again"?

Take weblogs as one example. There must be over a million of them but I seem to end up on the same handful of blogs all the time.

This may reflect my search habits, or my preference for sites of a certain style and quality, but I think the nature of how search engines reward -- via their infamous algorithms -- is at least partly to blame.

Maybe Google should offer a "randomise the results" button to replace the entirely useless "I'm feeling lucky" button?

Or Maybe Google's regular results should be made more like its News results, where results are clumped into stories, and users can choose from different sources of the same story or piece of information? (This would admittedly be tricky, as not all types of information are as interchangeable as newspaper stories are, but may work with some imaginative thinking.)

Just my €0.02 for today...

Today, when we think of PCs, we think of (maybe) IBM and (definitely) Microsoft Windows. And when we think of photocopiers, we think of Xerox.

But it all could have been so different. In its Research Center at Palo Alto (PARC), scientists working for Xerox developed the first personal computers and the first graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The Alto personal computer was first developed in 1973 -- almost two decades before IBM PCs would take the world by storm!

Missed opportunities? Perhaps, but at least Xerox managed to corner the photocopier market, and their errors can be forgiven when we realise that, in 1943, IBM chairman Thomas Watson forecast a world market for "maybe only five computers."

The fascinating history of Xerox's inventions -- from photocopiers and business applications to more general computing devices -- is recounted on the PARC website.

At an otherwise run-of-the-mill conference in San Francisco next week, a heavyweight triumvirate consisting of IBM, Sony and Toshiba will announce details of an immanent technology that is expected by many to usher in a new generation of personal computing.

The group's new "Cell Architecture" chip is not just a more powerful microchip, it is also a new kind of microchip. The trio have redesigned the hardware and software architecture of the microchip from scratch, opening up new possibilities for distributed number-crunching and communications among all sorts of household appliances, from TV sets to mobile phones.

In short, the Cell may well change the way all computerized devices behave, much as the internet changed the way personal computers behave. Chips in servers, PCs, cars, cameras, PDAs and mobile phones will be able to "talk" to each other, and to share tasks. Indeed, the manufacturers claim that the product is being developed for the Playstation3 -- I suspect they are trying to avoid too much hype.

The Cell chip itself has been described by computer.org as a "supercomputer", not only capable of impressive linear computing, but also utilising advanced distributed computing techniques.

The Register claims that "no chip in years has caused as much excitement".

For an introductory (and nonetheless mind-boggling) explanation of the Cell and why it is so different to any chip that has gone before, see Nicholas Blanchford's comprehensive analysis.