Rafblog - Jake Cohen's Blog

Why are buyers so easily satisfied?

Every time I look at seller feedback left by previous buyers, whether on Ebay or other similar online sites, it is usually something similar to the following:

Excellent! Item arrived exactly as described! Very good seller! AAAAAA++++++++++++++

Why does a transaction where nothing extraordinary happened deserve such a glowing review? If I went into a coffee shop, and I ordered a cappuccino, and five minutes later, received it, I wouldn't go onto Yelp and write a review saying how great the coffee shop is because I got what I ordered.

It is really service above and beyond the ordinary that merits a glowing review. For example, my wife took her car to Acura of Bellevue for routine service, and they gave her a free rental (many dealerships do this), but then they moved all her stuff into the rental, and even transferred our son's car seat (which is not a quick or easy task) for her, which was a nice thing to do, and is not something you would ordinarily expect. When she forgot something and drove back to get it, they jogged out to the car to hand it to her so that she wouldn't have to park, get our son back out of his seat, and go inside the dealership.

This is the sort of "going above and beyond" service I feel merits a positive review. They recognized that dropping your car off for service while dealing with an infant can be troublesome, and they went out of their way to make it as easy as possible. When Acura corporate contacted us to ask how our recent service at the dealership went, we let them know that that dealer is keeping us happy and building trust and respect for the Acura brand. I would not have had the same positive things to say if they simply performed the service and gave our car back.

Recently, I ordered an air conditioner mounting bracket online. They shipped the part, and it arrived. A few days later, I received an e-mail from them asking me to go write a positive review for them. For what? What did they do to deserve a positive review? Not steal my money or bungle a fairly simple transaction? Sorry, you have to do better than the minimum to earn a positive review. Of course, I'm not going to write a negative review either, but I'm not going out of my way to tell other people that this company can complete transactions in an adequate fashion.

Faster? Or As Fast As

The new iPhone has been announced. I was reading the Techcrunch article about it, and noticed one of my grammar pet peeves staring back at me from the second paragraph:

Most applications will run at least 2 times faster, according to Apple.

The problem with this, is that the phrase "2 times faster" actually means "three times as fast as." Yet, in nearly all cases, they really just mean "twice as fast as."

This is the same sort of writing that leads people to distrust anything you say. Like advertising a sale where you can "save up to 50% or more" on anything in the store. What does that actually mean? If you can actually save more than 50% on something, why not say that?

I think what is happening is that the marketing appeal of certain language wins out over the need to be precise. "Over 400 titles available!" sounds more impressive than "403 titles available." "Save up to 50% or more!" sounds more impressive than "Save up to 51%." And, of course, "2 times faster" sounds more impressive than "2 times as fast." After all, one has the word "fast", and the other has "faster."

Still, I think the language you choose for describing the technical advances of the latest version of a popular electronic device needs to be a bit more precise than what you would use to lure shoppers to your booth at a county fair. Whether the phone is double or triple the speed is a much more important difference than whether that Ginsu knife can make tomato slices that are twice or three times as thin as a standard kitchen knife.

Form Follows Function

A recent New York Times article claims the Demise of 'Form Follows Function'.

One of the main examples they use is the iPod Shuffle, claiming that you could not reasonably expect to figure out that the device is meant to play music by looking at it.

I think this implies a corollary to the "form follows function" postulate, that could be called "function can be deduced from form." I do not think this is always the case, nor do I think it needs to be. The meaning of "form follows function" is that the ideal physical construction and appearance of something should be derived from what it is meant to do. Unless one of the things that the object is meant to do is to convey a sense of what it is used for, then this does not need to be reflected in how the object looks.

To use the iPod Shuffle example, its form does in fact follow its function. When you consider that its function is to play music and to be as small and simple as possible. This sort of tradeoff happens all the time. They used to make AM/FM radio headphones, where you trade off the convenience of general-purpose headphones for the convenience of only having to use a single device and no cord when you want to listen to the radio.

As another example, look at the typical office stapler. There's no real way to deduce that this is used to fasten pieces of paper together without actually trying to use it for that purpose. Yet its construction reflects its purpose. You can't always tell what something does by looking at it, but the way it looks often makes sense based on its purpose, once you know it.

rafb.net paste has been discontinued

After nearly seven years, and having hosted over 2.25 million individual pastes, I have decided to shut down rafb.net/paste for good.

It was becoming a major time sink to keep the thing running, not because of any operational burden from ordinary users, but because more and more people were using the site for spam, url exchange, attempted DDoS attacks, and other purposes for which it was not designed.

As much as I enjoyed providing a service that let people share source code and other small text snippets with each other, it unfortunately reached a point where I couldn't leave the thing unattended for more than a week or so before there would be some new problem I would have to deal with.

I've decided to open up more of the source code for people who want to create their own pastebins.

If you've used rafb.net/paste in the past, then thank you for your interest and support.

Really, Paypal?

Why is it that transferring money from my bank account to my Paypal account takes "3-4 business days", but sending a payment to someone, where the source of that payment is my linked bank account (the same account, in fact) happens instantly?

Where is that 3-4 day delay coming from?

If the delay were in the other direction (from Paypal to my bank account), at least there would be the dubious justification of earning a few days interest on the money while it sits in limbo, but adding a delay to incoming money makes no sense at all.

Netflix CEO Tax Thoughts

The New York Times recently published an Op-Ed piece from the CEO of Netflix. In this article, he describes his opinion that President Obama's idea to put a cap on executive pay is a bad idea, and that instead, they should have higher taxes on these luxurious compensation packages.

Part of his reasoning for this is that, in his words, "luring a top executive away from another company is never easy or cheap." This argument is used over and over again to justify the enormous compensation packages offered to CEOs and other top executives.

These executives have done a poor job in the public eye of earning their exhorbitant salaries and bonuses. It is hard to buy the argument that this level of compensation is needed to attract top talent when, based on their performance, we cannot see any evidence that they deserve to be labeled "top talent" in the first place. For some reason, this sort of attribute is just assumed of executives at this level and is categorically applied to justify the salaries they earn across the board.

Why can't these large bonuses be made contingent on performance? As part of the bailout package, companies have to demonstrate a plan for getting their books back in the black, right? I would have no problem offering a very large bonus to an executive who could come in and make that happen. However, I don't think it is appropriate to offer luxurious compensation to attract a "top talent" executive without some sort of contingency on their performance once they've taken the reins.

Netflix, why

Netflix, why do you make things harder than they need to be?

Here are the steps I took to try to watch instant content on my computer through Netflix:

1. Switch from Firefox to IE, as they only support IE 6+
2. Install an ActiveX control
3. Get a new DRM file with a unique ID
4. Upgrade Windows Media Player to version 11
5. Upgrade a component of Windows Media Player
6. Get a DRM license to watch the show or movie

By contrast, here are the steps required to view something on a site like Amazon Video on Demand:

1. Open it in your browser

Or Hulu:

1. Open it in your browser

I've been a long-time customer of Netflix, but recently they seem intent on snubbing customers any way they can, whether it is this video playback runaround, or their announcement not too long ago that they would be removing the ability to have multiple queues per account (a decision that, thankfully, they decided not to follow through with after the backlash from their customers).

If Netflix is truly a believer in video on demand as the next big thing, shouldn't they get it right? Netflix is not exactly putting their best foot forward here.

Don't use Brick and Mortar Metaphors for Online Business

Lately I've been becoming more and more tired of the way many online businesses are operating as if they were a brick and mortar business. Specifically, the concept of processing fees and business hours.

Alaska Airlines, for example, charges a $25 "processing fee" to transfer frequent flier miles from one account to another. I don't think that amount of computing cost has been worth $25 since about 1955. It doesn't require any human processing at all. They should just call a spade a spade and admit they're charging a bogus fee just because they can.

Washington Mutual, as another example, lets you access your accounts 24/7, but transactions only take effect during "business hours." For example, if you transfer money between accounts in the middle of the night, it won't take effect until the following day. What are they waiting for? It's not like someone comes in in the morning and processes the pending transactions, it's all done by the computer. There's no legitimate reason for the delay.

I guess it comes down to the fact that you're essentially a captive customer. If an online store had a message at 11pm saying "Hi, please come back during business hours to place your order", customers would just shop elsewhere. But in the case of airline frequent flier miles or bank accounts, you're pretty much stuck. You're not going to abandon those frequent flier miles, or leave the money untransferred.

Ultimately you may decide to look for another airline or another bank that doesn't have these restrictions and fees, but the problem is, they all do this. There really isn't anything you can do.

CD/DVD Drives and Windows

Why is it, after all this time, that we still have to press "OK" when we insert a disc that some program is waiting for? Can't it just figure it out? CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives have provided notifications when a disc is inserted for at least 10 years now.

Maybe Windows isn't the problem, and every application needs to write their own code to detect that the disc has been inserted, which is also stupid, but for slightly different reasons, and also indicates that the code should just be part of Windows to begin with.

Don't Allow Your Application to Hang

One of the more frustrating things a GUI application can do is to become unresponsive while it is doing something or waiting for something to happen.

For example, to pick on Microsoft products, both Excel and Outlook have a problem where, if they are waiting for some operation to complete (such as fetching data from a remote file, or opening a .pst file locally), the application will not respond to anything, not even the message from the operating system telling the app to paint itself. From the user's perspective, the app is frozen, and only experience tells them to just wait a few moments and the app will "recover".

Applications often use a progress bar to indicate that stuff is happening, seemingly to show about how much relative time is left to complete the operation. But a new fad has been sweeping GUI application design in recent years: the "circular progress bar", as I call it, which will reset to the beginning when it reaches the end. These progress bars are meaningless for determining if anything is actually happening, or how much is left. They are seemingly only there so that the user can see that the app has not frozen. The problem is, when the application reaches some particularly intensive calculation, or waiting on some data, the progress bar freezes! It can't even keep a simple animation running.

Are GUI programmers so afraid of multiple threads or processes that they allow their applications' very responsiveness to wait synchronously on something else their application is doing?

Sometimes it doesn't make sense for the user to be able to perform any new actions before whatever else they did has completed, but they should at least be able to raise/lower the window's focus, move the window, see the data that was in the window before, and especially cancel whatever operation they had kicked off.

And please, if you include a progress bar, make it meaningful. Circular progress bars are about as useful as the rotating hourglass mouse cursor.