Reverend Ted's Blog

Open Letter to eBay CEO John Donahoe

Ted Haeger — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 22:54:03 +0000

Does eBay Really Need a Special Exception to online tax collection? I received an email from eBay’s CEO, stating

…we believe small businesses with less than 50 employees or less than $10 million in annual out-of-state sales should be exempt from the burden of collecting sales taxes nationwide.

At first blush, the exception seems reasonable. But considering eBay’s business model, it’s completely self-serving. I replied to the address from which he sent the email. Since it might bounce, I share my response publicly.

Mr. Donahoe:

I agree that processing state & local taxes could be a burden on small businesses, especially the sort of special-focus, long tail small businesses that reach customers far and wide through eBay. eBay’s opportunity is to alleviate this burden. How? Provide new services & API’s in your platform to make tax collection a dead-simple process. Wouldn’t this render eBay an even more strategic platform for the small businesses that integrate with your platform? Coming from eBay–a company among the first to demonstrate how a web platform could simplify doing business online for micro-businesses–the “burden of collecting sales taxes nationwide” argument is rather specious. I notice that eBay does not advocate that all businesses of the scale you state–online or not–should get that exception.

Online businesses have had a remarkable opportunity to germinate and prosper for nearly two decades free of sales taxes. As online sales have grown, state and local governments’ revenues have declined. That affects our schools, highways, municipal services and other infrastructure. Furthermore, since the demographics show that online shoppers are generally wealthier than those who don’t shop online, isn’t your exception for online micro-businesses a special accommodation for higher-income households?

Perhaps eBay needs to re-think this issue in broader terms than asking for a special exception for eBay’s sweet spot in the market.

Thanks for your email and consideration of my response,

Ted Haeger

Donohoe’s complete letter follows.

Dear Ted,

Congress is considering online sales tax legislation that is wrongheaded and unfair, and I am writing to ask for your help in telling Congress “No!” to new sales taxes and burdens for small businesses.

Whether you’re a consumer who loves the incredible selection and value that small businesses provide online, or a small-business seller who relies on the Internet for your livelihood, this legislation potentially affects you. For consumers, it means more money out of your pocket when you shop online from your favorite seller or small business shop owner. For small business sellers, it means you would be required to collect sales taxes nationwide from the more than 9,600 tax jurisdictions across the U.S. You also would face the prospect of being audited by out-of-state tax collectors. That’s just wrong, and an unnecessary burden on you.

Big national retailers are aggressively lobbying Congress to pass online sales tax legislation to “level the playing field” with Amazon. And, as they compete with big retail, Amazon is advocating for this legislation too, while at the same time they are seeking local tax exemptions across the country to build warehouses. This is a “big retail battle” in which small businesses and consumers have a lot to lose. But eBay is fighting, as we have for more than 15 years, to protect small online businesses and sellers and ensure healthy competition, value, and selection that benefit consumers online.

The solution is simple: if Congress passes online sales tax legislation, we believe small businesses with less than 50 employees or less than $10 million in annual out-of-state sales should be exempt from the burden of collecting sales taxes nationwide. To put that in perspective, Amazon does more than $10 million in sales every 90 minutes. So we believe this is a reasonable exemption to protect small online businesses. That’s what we’re fighting for, and what big companies such as Amazon are fighting against.

I hope you agree that imposing unnecessary tax burdens on small online businesses is a bad idea. Join us in letting your Members of Congress know they should protect small online businesses, not potentially put them out of business. Click here [link removed] to make your voice heard. Together, I believe our voices can make a difference.

Sincerely,

John Donahoe
President and CEO
eBay Inc.

Thoughts on Amazon Cloud Drive’s New Sync Client

Ted Haeger — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 16:39:45 +0000

I’m a big fan of Amazon. They sell me many things, and I am totally hooked on Amazon Prime. So my first reaction to their new new sync client for Cloud Drive was the same as many others, ”What took them so long?” Then I wanted more details on how it works. From my experience as product manager for Mozy Stash, I believe that the efficiency of a file sync client makes or breaks the core offering. Delving in, this initial release of Cloud Drive is disappointing.

Size Matters

File sync clients must “just work.” One aspect for that is their demand on system resources.

Installer Package Size (Mac OS)

Let’s start by comparing the size of the installer package, which gives us a rough idea of how efficient the developers’ code is. The smaller the package, the more efficient.

EMC Syncplicity: 11.7 MB
Mozy Stash: 10.8 MB
Google Drive: 24.7 MB
Dropbox: 27.4 MB
Amazon Cloud Drive: 16.6 MB

Amazon fares pretty well against the two most popular sync tools, but file sync is a hard game. Companies that venture into file sync typically have to learn numerous gotchas of sync, and their software expands as the developers make fixes to handle all of the intricacies. As Amazon does so–and adds more features–expect their package to grow accordingly.

Next, let’s look at the memory footprint.

Memory

When I saw that Cloud Sync requires Java to be installed, I knew that Cloud Drive might be something of a memory hog. Here is the RAM usage while each of the following clients are idle, taken just as a quick snapshot.

EMC Syncplicity: 27.5 MB
Mozy Stash: 17.3 MB
Google Drive: 86.6 MB
Dropbox: 44.5 MB
Amazon Cloud Drive: 56.5 MB

Cloud Drive shows two related processes in Activity Monitor, so the number above totals the two. So, Cloud Drive does seem inefficient, but Amazon can rest easy next to Google Drive. (What are those self-important Mountain View PhD’s doing, anyway?!)

If Stash seems remarkably lean compared to the next two lowest, Syncplicity and Dropbox, I should note that Stash does not have some of the features that Syncplicity and Dropbox provide. For example, Stash lacks the right-click context menu on Mac OS (the platform from which I did my brief comparisons).

While fewer features may give Stash an advantage in memory utilization, no sync client runs leanest of all. My point is that the comparison is inherently skewed, and I’d like to have the menus. Nevertheless, Amazon Cloud Drive is feature poor compared to the others, so why does it have the 2nd highest utilization?

Over-the-Wire

The third realm of file sync efficiency is differential sync. When you update a file, does the software upload the whole file, or just the changes? Do other linked computers download the changes, or do they have to pull the whole updated file? I covered differential sync in Mozy Stash back in January. Dropbox put themselves on the map long ago with a video showcasing differential sync.

Amazon makes no mention of Differential Sync, so we must assume they don’t have it. Apparently, Google Drive does not offer differential sync either. But what does differential sync matter? The classic case for differential sync is the id3 tags in your music files. Say you add some album art, or correct a misspelled album title. That tiny change causes a sync engine to upload the whole big music file, and every other computer to download it. And since it was the album details, it’s not just one file. Only Dropbox and Stash handle this scenario with the extreme efficiency that makes a solid sync client. Since Amazon delivers the digital music they sell you by putting it directly into your cloud drive, differential sync seems especially important in the context of Cloud Drive. Maybe they’re working on it?

Conclusion

All in all, Amazon Cloud Sync is a good step for Amazon, but they have work to do on efficiency. To be sure, they’re not nearly so careless as Google Drive, but if this first release is any indicator, they need to knuckle down now if they want to avoid being yet another entrant that doesn’t really grok what differentiates a sync engine.

___

Note The observations and opinions I present above are my own. Mozy recently rejoined EMC, so EMC is now my employer. Mozy is working with the Syncplicity team, although I am not directly involved in that collaboration.

Working at Mozy

Ted Haeger — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 18:42:38 +0000

Although I have been blogging all too seldom in the past couple years, I want to share one of my responses for the “Best Companies to Work For in Utah” survey conducted annually by UtahBusiness.com. Why? Because I want to share with tech professionals in Utah what its like working at Mozy right now.

Please list the benefits you enjoy about the company.

The biggest benefit at Mozy is the people with whom you get to surround yourself.

Year over year, Mozy’s culture gets better and better. Collaboration between teams has reached a new height, and the resulting innovation is exhilarating and infectious. A new colleague can approach just about anyone in R&D, sit down and have an intense, illuminating discussion. You come away feeling smarter than you did before.

Mozy has people working on deep cryptography challenges, solving problems of petabyte-scale storage, and researching new models for managing multi-tenant cloud services. I have colleagues who have helped write standards for the worldwide web (a former W3C employee), who have helped build internationally recognized brands (a former brand manager for Xbox Live), and who have applied the Google data center model to design one of the world’s largest-scale, fault-tolerant storage systems from consumer-grade disk hardware (Mozy’s 90-petabyte storage infrastructure).

Mozy’s newest addition, Stash–a file synchronization feature similar to Dropbox, but with the security and management that businesses demand–is renewing Mozy as a regional a talent magnet. How many companies in Utah can claim to run a high-scale, popular and successful SaaS that is built to endure as long as Mozy?

___

So, yeah…If you’re looking for a great place to apply your talent in Utah, Mozy has a lot to offer.

Pure Awesome

Ted Haeger — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 23:41:59 +0000

So, I clicked it.

Wow, that was ugly.

Ted Haeger — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 02:59:55 +0000

Did these guys just totally take each other off the board? How will people react to their behavior tonight?

Photo from ABCNews article.

CareerBuilder.com Inhumanity

Ted Haeger — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 04:57:30 +0000

A few years back, I wrote a letter to CareerBuilder about their Superbowl adverts for their exploitative use of chimpanzees. I shared the letter on my alter-ego blog. A few people left comments telling me that I totally missed the funny.

Before doing it again this year, I hope CareerBuilder.com will take into account two articles. The first is “Cute TV Chimps May Harm Their Wild Brethren” from Science Magazine. The second is an article from The Christian Science Monitor called “Super Bowl commercials: What happens to those CareerBuilder chimps?“

Wild chimpanzees…gone within our own lifetimes. But golly, they’re entertaining!

My Republican Debate Rundown

Ted Haeger — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 02:17:20 +0000

Romney – Oh, snore!
Bachman – Crazy.
Paul – What’s this “Constitution” thing he keeps harping on about, and why does he think it’s relevant?
Cain – If was running under “Herman”…
Gingrich – 1994…only now his head seems bigger.
Parry – See Bachman, subtract scientific literacy. (Yes, he’s in deficit…and I’d like to buy a vowel.)
Huntsman – Inviable. As he steadily earns my respect, his chances diminish.
Santorum – Ew! Why, Google? Why?!

2010 in review

Ted Haeger — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 16:39:00 +0000

After this paragraph, the rest of the post is completely penned by WordPress.com. They give me seemingly high marks for my blog, while noting that I only posted 16 times in 2010. Remiss? Maybe. My top posts date back to early 2007 and before, when I was blogging actively for my role at Novell. But from the silver lining department, one of my top 5 referrers was bobjamieson.net, a paleo-geek’s blog. Perhaps a sign of things to come in 2011?

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 40,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 5 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 16 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 384 posts. There were 8 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 198kb.

The busiest day of the year was January 5th with 206 views. The most popular post that day was Mac vs. PC: How Would Linux Fit?.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were stumbleupon.com, roseindia.net, linuxcompatible.org, bobjamieson.net, and facebook.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for linux, wallpaper, mac, suse wallpaper, and opensuse wallpaper.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Mac vs. PC: How Would Linux Fit? March 2007
204 comments

Can Linux Desktops Live in an Active Directory World? September 2006
65 comments

OpenOffice.org and Excel VBA Macros July 2006
25 comments

SUSE Wallpaper #2 August 2006
1 comment

Show Me That New GNOME Main Menu June 2006
34 comments

Is Steve Jobs Killing Housecats?

Ted Haeger — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 17:27:38 +0000

Magsafe: Dealer of Feline Death?

Droves of house cats may be dying, and Apple’s Steve Jobs may be to blame. Apple’s latest revision of the Magsafe power adapter has a new cable coating that seems to be purposely tailored to lure innocent kittens to a convulsive, incendiary death.

The as-yet unconfirmed but increasingly popular rumor is that specifications sourcing from One Infinite Loop in Cupertino are directing sweatshop laborers in Jiangsu to mix concentrated cat nip extract into the formula used for the latest Magsafe cable coating.

I only recently became aware of this when a friend reported to me that his cat had chewed through the cables of both of his brand new power adapters. Some short research revealed that my friend and his furry, fried feline not alone:

“This just in- Magsafe plugs are not compatible with Cats” cites numerous accounts of cat-damage, noting that despite apparently intentional design, Apple’s warrantee explicitly exempts cat-chew damage
“MacSam” reports numerous incidents of cats chewing through his MacBook power cords
“eccentricglow” experienced the similar
“Auroraboy” and “Jayo83“ both report similar on Apple’s own forums
Larry Gilbert further traces the problem back to earlier, less effective models

Certainly, these are merely a few examples, and none actually lethal. But as with all things reported via the Internet Tubes, each incident must be multiplied by one million (at least) to devine an estimate for how many incidents have gone unreported. Who knows how many of these have ended in tragedy?

OS X names aside (“Snow Leopard” indeed!), it’s a well known factoid that Steve Jobs hates cats. We should have seen this coming.

With INTERPOL occupied by ongoing WikiLeaks investigations and the record for US police agencies turning a blind eye to cat crimes (those K-9 units? we know whose side you’re on), a wave of vigilante tabbies may be emerging:

Note No cats were actually harmed in the creation of this blog entry.

Hey, Sealy: You Suck!

Ted Haeger — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 19:43:49 +0000

You know that old line of jokes about The Mattress Police, the people who check whether a mattress still has its law tags attached? If you live in the U.S., then you probably do. After all, it was a joke in the 1985 movie Fletch, an author uses it for his registered domain name, and there are t-shirts, a punk band, and countless other links riffing on the concept. The whole joke is based on the absurd notion that someone checks such an obscure thing. Of course, the tags also state that the tags can be removed by the consumer, so it’s just a joke. Right?

Not according to Sealy. They use those tags as a way to weasel out of their warranty. Wow. Sealy just screwed me out of $1000+.

In Spring of 2007, I bought a California King Sealy mattress. The mattress has turned out to be an epic fail. Within 3 years it began to cave in, and now it has sunken in deep enough to cause me a lot of back pain. However, Sealy will not honor their 10 year warranty because I removed the “law tags.”

Although the warranty states that you must have these, the tags merely state that they may only be removed by the consumer. They don’t mention that removing the tags can void your warranty. Talk about your fine-print technicality.

Sealy uses cheap technicalities to get out of serving customers. That really sucks, Sealy. You suck, Sealy.

I post this rant because I hope that some small number of people will see this and avoid Sealy when purchasing a Sealy sleep set.

I’ll take it down should Sealy ever decide that their brand matters enough to honor the warranty that helped their authorized retailer sell me their shoddy Shy Blossom mattress.