Richtig said Fred!

Businesses can change their mind like for example Amazon.com that has stopped selling MP3s to their Canadian customers. But so can customers, who prefer to take all their business somewhere else. I used to buy quite often from Amazon.com, but now I will look elsewhere until they lift these stupid restrictions.

You can leave comments on Amazon.com’s blog here http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK3GRDQKLEO6WFM

Palm is starting Preorders on its smallest smartphone to date. The palm Centro is NOT availlable as GSM phone unfortunately, so it is targeted to the North-American market for now. The Centro is possibly the smallest Smartphone availlable this year, and it does have nice features: Bluetooth, a 320×320 display and 1.3MP camera.

The real price is 399$, but if you lock yourself with a provider you can have it for as little as 99$ which is nice for some.

You can read about the Centro on Palm’s Blog or visit the Palm Centro Site

Here’s a fun update, after several purchases on the Amazon MP3 store, today I have started receiving this stupid message whenever I try to make purchases:

We are sorry…

We could not process your order because of geographical restrictions on the product which you were attempting to purchase. Please refer to the terms of use for this product to determine the geographical restrictions.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

So it seems Amazon has started putting a “USA Only” enforcement on their MP3 store, why get business from Canadian customers when you can just mess with their mind by allowing purchases then denying them purchases, all in the same week.

Here is a strange pricing scheme I have just found on the store, The Chemical Brothers’ Single “Electrobank” is 1.87$ for 3 songs, but the first and third song are 1.94$ each… My guess is that the pricing is dictated by a set of rules and since those 2 songs are quite long (over 7 minutes long each) then their prices is higher.

Here’s the link to Electrobank from the Chemical Brothers.

Here is an interesting posting from Mike Hearn, a Google software developer on Slashdot:

For instance, I’m one of the very few people who have Maps logs access (ie, I can see cookies and IP addresses), and that’s only because I work directly with the servers on a day-to-day basis and do abuse handling as part of my job. The vast majority of Maps developers have no logs access at all. I have to periodically rejustify my access, I’m not allowed to track any individual cookie or IP address for longer than 24 hours, my own usage of the logs is recorded and audited, I’m not allowed to take the logs out of their secure holding area and am not allowed to give logs in non-scrubbed form to anybody else. Violating these rules is grounds for instant termination. Contrast this with ISPs which sell clickstream data [seekingalpha.com] on the open market.

I would like to point out that very few companies handle logs and user data with that level of protection. I have seen quite a few places where webserver logs are not properly secured and not considered as important as user information like addresses and phone numbers (which are publicly availlable in the white pages). Google understands privacy issues clearly which is better than most companies out there.

You can read Mike Hearn’s complete comment on Slashdot here.

Another discovery today, Ã ;GRUMH is availlable, I wish they had more CDs from them. But it is well worth browsing the MP3 store and making discoveries like that.