Why "Alexa?"

According to Amazon's Senior Vice President of Devices, David Limp, there are two reasons why the company's voice service is named "Alexa":

The problem was choosing a word that people didn't ordinarily use in everyday life. "Computer" wouldn't cut it. So after testing various names, the team landed on a word Alexa, that used soft vowels and an "x." It sounded fairly unique.

But the engineers also liked the name for that somewhat geeky Star Trek-ish reason. It was "a little reminiscent of the library of Alexander" which was at one time the keeper of "all knowledge," Limp said.

I suspect a third: It's evocative of ELIZA. Don't know why that occurred to me, but it did and I just thought I'd share.

We've got two Alexa-powered speakers in our home: An Echo Dot and a Eufy Genie. I bought both on sale at ~$20 each.

The Dot is more powerful in certain ways -- it has Bluetooth to connect to a speaker while the Genie doesn't, it can make phone calls to my contact list, etc. -- but they're both good at the basics. "Alexa, what's the weather?" "Alexa, set a time for 10 minutes/alarm for 6am," "Alexa, play some Grateful Dead," and so on. I like them, but obviously your mileage may vary over privacy concerns and so forth.

@AmazonHelp, This Should Not Be a Hard Thing to Do

My cable Internet provider, Cox, has a bandwidth cap. A fairly generous one -- 1,024 Gb per month before I have to purchase additional bandwidth -- but a cap nonetheless. I've never come anywhere close to busting that cap, but I see that this month I'm on track to come in not very far under it.

The reason: Amazon Prime video.

For whatever reason, this month most of my household's video streaming has been over Amazon rather than e.g. Netflix, and a lot of it has been over an Amazon Fire TV stick and/or one of the kids' game consoles.

Netflix and Sling both allow me to set video quality according to my own desire, e.g. high definition, standard definition or even low quality.

Amazon lets me do that if I'm watching video from my computer desktop, but for those other devices it insists on streaming video at the highest quality my television will handle. And that means that an hour of viewing will consume 3Gb of bandwidth instead of the 800Mb of bandwidth it would consume at standard quality.

This is a simple fix, guys. Just update your other device apps to let the user choose the video quality, or even let the user set it in his or her Amazon.com account settings.

I cannot for the life of me figure out why that wasn't one of the first features Amazon put into its streaming service. Why would they want to spend extra money on bandwidth from their end when many of their customers would probably be at least as happy (in my case happier) to stream in SD as in HD most of the time?

I wonder if it's costing them any customers. It hasn't cost them me and my $10.xx monthly Prime fee.

Yet.

I Guess it's Fair to Say ...

... that my $50 e-reader idea is passe.

I've run into a couple of cheap e-readers in the $50-$80 range lately, but they're no-wifi, good-for-nothing-except-reading-books machines. Who'd pay that much for that little when multi-function, wifi-enabled Android tablets are now breaking into the sub-$100 range?

Take a look at the specs for that $99 Android 4 ("Ice Cream Sandwich") tablet, the Novo7. It's got a 1GHz CPU. It's got wifi. Two built-in cameras. Capacitive touch screen with "multi-touch" capability.

I'm still quite happy with my $130 Android 2.x Cruz Reader, which I've had for most of a year now, but we're talking iPad-level tech for less than a hundred bucks now. I'm already juggling my budget numbers to figure out how I can afford one.

So, the dedicated e-reader died before it hit the $50 price point. Yeah, I'm sure they'll be going for less than $50 in discount bins soon but I was talking about as a retail launch product.

The new price range is $99-$199 -- Novo7 at the low end, Amazon's Kindle Fire at the high end -- for a tablet that does the e-reader thing and a whole lot more.

But no, none of these are "iPad killers." The iPad's price will probably drift down into the $250-$300 range for a wifi-only model, but Apple fans will continue to be willing to pay a little more for their favorite company's products.

Taking Amazon at their word ...

Amazon.com's spokesperson says (as reported by the Wall Street Journal) that the company's reasons for booting Wikileaks from its servers were half ideological, half just plain false, and not due to pressure from the US government:

It was "inaccurate" to claim that pressure from the U.S. government or large-scale attacks by hackers caused the company to discontinue its service of WikiLeaks, said Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener in a statement ...

The false part:

WikiLeaks "doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content," one of the stipulations of Amazon's contractual terms, he said.

There are no "intellectual property" implications here. US government documents aren't protected by copyright. Whether "nobody" owns them or "everybody" owns them is an interesting question, but what's absolutely certain is that Wikileaks is not violating any "intellectual property" rights by making them available. Herdener is, at the very least, prevaricating wildly there.

The ideological part:

Mr. Herdener said that Amazon's terms of service also require that content "will not cause injury to any person or entity." Yet he said "it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy.

So the spokesperson for the largest bookstore on earth publicly claims that words are dangerous and can hurt people and that Amazon wants nothing to do with words like that. Chalk up a new high for cognitive dissononance.

And for hypocrisy -- as of a few minutes ago, Amazon is still selling The Communist Manifesto, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and In Praise of Public Life: The Honor And Purpose Of Political Service.

If words really are dangerous and really can hurt people, well, each of the aforementioned books can be plausibly linked to more deaths than the entire Wikileaks ouvre has been so far.

So much for Amazon being the "victim," as some opponents of a boycott -- at least one of whom for some reason felt the need to email me with an invitation to go fuck myself for even temporarily dissociating myself from Amazon while I awaited their explanation -- have claimed.

So far as I'm concerned, my negative social and economic preferencing of Amazon has now transitioned from temporary to permanent: I just don't care to do business with the company any more. Your mileage may vary, and that's fine. You can even bust my balls about it if it makes you feel better.

If anyone wants to do something techy to support dissociation by Amazon affiliates, some Blogger and WordPress scripts for removing/replacing Amazon links in an automated manner would be really cool. That's a task I'm not looking forward to doing manually.

Please Don't Feed the Amazon

Amazon.com has apparently booted Wikileaks off of its hosting services. Antiwar.com is calling for a boycott of Amazon.

As I've mentioned before, I'm a long-time Amazon customer (pretty much since they started) and an affiliate. I'm not a big customer, but I've been pretty loyal. I'm not a big affiliate, but since I've made a little money from them, they've presumably made a little money on me.

Earlier this morning I:

- Notified Amazon that until I see an explanation from them, I'm taking my shopping elsewhere (hint: It's Christmas shopping season, which probably accounts for the bulk of my Amazon purchases each year); and that unless that explanation is damn good and pretty quick in arriving, I'll permanently dissociate myself from them as both a customer and an affiliate.

- Donated €3,50 (a little under US$5) to Wikileaks in lieu of a $3.99 Kindle purchase I'd been planning to make (I recently downloaded the Kindle app to the kids' Windoze machine, have downloaded some free books and purchased a couple, and was about to give it a favorable review).

On the off chance that Amazon will come back with a believable "wait a minute guys, it's not like that at all," I'm not going to start the arduous task of combing through a hundred thousand posts or so (close to 1,700 here at KN@PPSTER, 90,000+ at Rational Review, etc.) and removing Amazon links just yet. But please, don't click on Amazon links here, and don't buy from Amazon, at least for now.

Speaking of all this, my latest piece at C4SS is about the Wikileaks "diplomatic cables" saga. Check it out.

Props for Amazon

[Update: I no longer associate with Amazon, for reasons explained elsewhere, but neither do I see any need to "memory hole" my past comments about them. All links in this post have been changed to point to Powell's]

I complain when I don't feel like I've been treated right, so I should likewise trumpet it when I'm treated exceptionally well.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned here on KN@PPSTER that I had pre-ordered F. Paul Wilson's new Repairman Jack novel, Fatal Error, along with two used books (Fractions, comprising the first two books of Ken Macleod's Fall Revolution cycle, and The Cassini Division, the third book in that cycle).

Fractions was available, and arrived almost immediately. The other two books were held to be shipped together.

Here's what happened next:

- I got an email from Amazon letting me know that they were refunding $3.15 of my money due to their "low price guarantee" -- they lowered the price of the Repairman Jack novel before it was shipped, and gave me the better price.

- I got an email notifying me that the order had been shipped.

- I waited. And waited. And then forgot. And then remembered. And then looked at my account screen on Amazon this morning and saw that the order was marked as "delivered" on the 15th of October.

- I consulted Amazon's "help" and "contact us" stuff, and sent them a brief note explaining that I hadn't received the shipment.

- About ten minutes later I received a courteous response. The F. Paul Wilson novel is being re-sent, with courtesy upgrade to one-day shipping. The Macleod novel was used and is out of stock. They refunded my money on that one, and gave me a link to find other available used copies of it.

- I promptly followed that link, but on a hunch I decided to see if any cheap copies of Divisions, which includes the missing book and the fourth book in the cycle, were available. They were. I bought one for $1.29 more than the single (but gone missing) book had cost me.

That, folks, is customer service. A bit of a delay (mostly due to my inattention), and I ended up getting an extra book ... for $1.86 less than I initially paid.

I should also mention that I've been an Amazon customer since 1995. I placed only one order that year (their first year in business), for a copy of L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach. They sent me (and, I assume, all their other customers) a mousepad for Christmas that year. Since then I've placed several orders every year. I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've ever had a problem, and it was corrected damn near instantly once I reported it.

I like Amazon.