Web dev's crawler took down major online bookstore by buying too many books

Thank you, dear reader, for tearing yourself away from Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales long enough to visit The Register, just in time for this fresh installment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of unforced errors, and how you bounced back afterwards. This week, meet a reader we …

[UCAP]

Sounds like Jim came very close to booking a trip to the job center.

[Korev]

Yeah, he was lucky not to be shelved

[DJV]

Indeed. That would have put him in a bind if he hadn't been the right type to fess up instead of cover up and fix the issue. People should definitely take a page out of his book!

[spireite]

Almost bookended, could've lost an appendix.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

That would have lead to a new chapter in his life.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

>Sounds like Jim came very close to booking a trip to the job center.

Why? the 50000% increase in sales meant that the companies share price should have gone up by $Billions

Next month he should have upgraded the crawler to buy even more books from themselves

[ChoHag]

If you read between the lines you'll see this was in the old days when companies were expected to actually make money rather than just moving it around amongst themselves in a bloated incestuous orgy of lemon* ponzi capitalism.

[*] If you know, you know.

[Anonymous Anti-ANC South African Coward]

Lemonparty, the finest ever.

[Guido Esperanto]

Haha one of the finest trolling urls to have graced the internet

[Michael Hoffmann]

This wouldn't have been a certain online bookstore that I frequented in the early/mid 90s?

Somewhat wonky website (weren't they all?), but a good way to get US books fairly cheaply from Europe.

They charged my CC twice once, and I wrote to customer support and got an email of apology and rectification, signed by "Jeff".

I never did find out whether they had more than one "Jeff" at that time.

Also wonder what became of them. Started with an "A". A-something.

[Jamesit]

The one I use for finding rare and hard to find books is alibris.com, has sellers from all over the world.

[UCAP]

Was it Andromeda?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a footnote on the article:

"*It's the one that grew out of a bricks-and-mortar bookstore chain and has a name that sounds like a law firm, not the one named after a river"

So presumably Barnes & Noble

[djack]

Almost certainly not B&N If you ask me.

To keep up the faux mystery .. If you add an 's' onto the end of the name of a big London law firm you get the name of a big UK bookseller.

[agurney]

Do Sue, Grabbit and Runne sell books?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe

[Claptrap314]

Ahh, Life. My four-year old daughter came into the kitchen one day, and said she was trying to figure that out...

[red floyd]

Takeda, Monet, and Runne.

[W.S.Gosset]

Hitchcock, Scratchitt, and Easing, solicitors

[Ken Shabby]

Hunt, Lunt and Cunningham.

[collinsl]

Hi, I'm Vinny Slick of Bent and Oily Law Associates!

[Anonymous Anti-ANC South African Coward]

Fatten, Farten, Bursten and Ooze?

[Anonymous Coward]

I assumed it was not a UK based story, given the statement "valued at more than $50,000" along with the example domains being .com and referring to 'cart' (In the UK at that time it was all baskets)

[Roland6]

Could be a reference to Angus & Robertson and thus AUD.

[KarMann]

Pretty sure they're talking about B&N, given the 'sounds like a law firm' footnote.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

IIRC bookpool. You could buy US programming books that were priced at $1 = 1£ for 30-40% off the US price and have them delivered (very slowly) for almost nothing by book post

I stocked an entire library of animal covers in the early 90s

[MachDiamond]

"You could buy US programming books that were priced at $1 = 1£ for 30-40% off the US price and have them delivered (very slowly) for almost nothing by book post"

A local computer superstore I used to live by had a book section that would sell "outdated" books super cheap. I found that most applications didn't change that much from v4 to v5 so the older book covered about 90% of the current version. I'd often buy two copies and send one to a friend via Media Mail who would cut the binding off and run the pages through a high speed scanner and put them up on his BBS. I'm glad I donated towards the purchase of that guillotine paper cutter. It was hydraulic and scary as hell the way it could cut through two reams of paper smoothly. I'm sure I have digitized copies of the books, but they are so out of date now they aren't worth much.

[Roland6]

>” but they are so out of date now they aren't worth much.”

Depends on the topic and your interest.

I have all editions of Computer Networks by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. They are strikingly different and illustrate how networking has evolved and gone through significant changes over the decades.

[MachDiamond]

"Depends on the topic and your interest."

A good portion where along the lines of "How to Use Adboe Illustrator vX" rather than something with staying power. When X+1 came out, there would be a new edition of the book which is why they'd be flogged off for next to nothing. I don't think I found many good text books. I do have shelves full of reference/text books. A favorite is old formularies that I got into after reading "Lucifer's Hammer". I have a wee drop of prepper's blood in me.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used one of those guillotines! As you say, quite scary, but an awesome bit of kit.

[SVD_NL]

Whenever something silly happens with computers, i try to take the skeuomorphisms¹ literally.

In this case it means watching some madman running across aisles, sweeping everything into a shopping cart, preventing anyone else from buying books.

^{1 Whenever computer terms and elements reflect their real-world counterpart, e.g. your desktop and recycle bin, or floppy disks for saving files.}

[Vivid Professional]

I made a script on my website to run once an hour to collect any data on the Boeing 787's test flights. not wanting to wait an hour to see the results, I adjusted the parameters and sat back and watched as my webserver (shared hosting) went crazy and crashed.

instead of once an hour it tried to run the script once every 0.1 seconds.

i soon scrapped that idea never went back

[KittenHuffer]

It was a script to do with Boeing ...... it was bound to crash!

[spireite]

Did Boeing use your code for the MCAS system ?

[Bill Gray]

Circa 1990, the mapping company for which I then worked was looking at a contract for code to take a gridded elevation dataset and four latitude/longitude points, and determine the highest elevation within that quadrilateral. As the resident maths/algorithms guy, I started work on it. We were then told to stand down and switch to other projects.

I was relieved. I'd never written software that could kill people before (or since), and pictured myself writing a function that could result in an airplane hitting a mountain in a quadrilateral that my code had assured them had a maximum elevation of -32768 metres.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Fortunately the code also resulted in a fatality rate of -32768

[Bill Gray]

Hmmm... a negative fatality rate... I picture an empty airplane crashing and 32,768 people crawling out of the wreckage?

[PB90210]

It crashed on in a churchyard and they recovered 643 bodies...

[What? Me worry?]

Not Powell's then?

They had a web store in '94. The year before, you could email them your order. Convenient if you knew what it was you wanted, and then trundle over to the Technical Store by the Park Blocks. (Portland, Oregon USA for those not familiar with this PNW institution.) Loved the store, could care less for the tetchy cat. A few years later in my brief career as architect, I did design work for a quadrant of the City of Books block.

[Prst. V.Jeltz]

please America .....

could not care less for the tetchy cat

FTFY

smh

https://youtu.be/om7O0MFkmpw

Sometimes words and expressions get redefined by popular usage , but if that happens in this case , where the misappropriation means almost the opposite of the intended meaning , that would be a little tragic . Although having come across this bastardisation in 1989's "Lethal weapon 2" the other day , I feel this may already have happened

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: please America .....

We don't know the OP's attitude to the aforementioned feline - it's entirely possible he could care less or not less

[Prst. V.Jeltz]

Re: please America .....

Then he should learn to articulate these thoughts in a comprehensible manner!

[FeRDNYC]

Re: please America .....

It's "literally" killing me, the accelerating pace at which misunderstood / misheard cliches are coming to mean exactly the opposite of what they used to mean.

"Cannot be overstated" is the latest I've noticed. Not appreciating how the phrase subtly creates a superlative by denying the possibility of excessive praise, #KIDSTODAY are more and more bastardizing it into "cannot be understated". Which, again, is exactly the opposite.

So they think they're saying something akin to "should not be understated" or "must not be understated", when in fact they're insulting whatever it is they're trying to compliment, by claiming that any praise at all Is undeservedly excessive.

(And don't get me started on the verbing. Verbing weirds language.)

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: please America .....

Does "literally" now literally mean figuratively ?

[BryanFRitt]

Re: please America .....

The answer to this question can be either "literally" or "figuratively" take your pick.

[MachDiamond]

Re: please America .....

"Does "literally" now literally mean figuratively ?"

No. "Literally" is now just a null word that the younger set spinkle along with "actually" and "um" into their speech and, unfortunately, into their writing as well.

[Claptrap314]

Re: please America .....

I don't have this quote written, I would appreciate it if someone would correct me:

"I know certain people whose entire vocabulary has deliquesced to some half-dozen terms. They are blank cheques, to be filled out however the hearer desires. It matters not--the funds upon which they are drawn are empty"

The scary thing is that the quote is perhaps a century old at this point.

[PRR]

Re: please America .....

> I would appreciate it if someone would

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (Holmes, 1858) by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Chapter XI.

Below the verse.

"- I think there is one habit, - I said to our company a day or two afterwards - worse than that of punning. It is the gradual substitution of cant or flash terms for words which truly characterize their objects. I have known several very genteel idiots whose whole vocabulary had deliquesced into some half dozen expressions."

[that one in the corner]

Re: please America .....

The sad thing is, if you just take the words in order and think about each one and how it fits into the sentence, then "I could not care less about fried shrimp*" is not exactly a difficult statement to parse and comprehend. It isn't even as difficult as the whole "steep learning curve" problem, which does require you have a basic knowledge of how a graph plot works to understand!

Instead they just blindly repeat some string of noises because "that is what other people are saying": abrogating all responsibility for what comes out of their own mouths, the same way a babe in arms takes no responsibility for what it produces from the other end.

Of course, the worst of all are those who wilfully encourage the verbal idiocy, usually spouting drivel about "language changes all the time" and that anybody who complains about these items "just doesn't understand how it works", wilfully ignoring the fact that we're not railing against new and interesting coinage, about anything that extends our language's ability to express new concepts or delight in greater diversity.

* replace "fried shrimp" with an item of your own choosing, even if this is the only circumstance under which you'd want to choose that thing.

[Prst. V.Jeltz]

Re: please America .....

Of course, the worst of all are those who wilfully encourage the verbal idiocy, usually spouting drivel about "language changes all the time" and that anybody who complains about these items "just doesn't understand how it works", wilfully ignoring the fact that we're not railing against new and interesting coinage, about anything that extends our language's ability to express new concepts or delight in greater diversity.

.

Those people are just looking for an escape goat

So that their efforts are not graded as a damp squid.

[An_Old_Dog]

A Bit of Documentation by the Programmer

complete with a checklist, might have saved them from "forgetting".

[FeRDNYC]

Our intrepid documentarian has accidentally hit upon the Most Cunning Plan for Jim & co. to have extricated themselves from this predicament.

If Cellino & Barnes & No-Bull WAS actually a law firm, as well as a bookstore, then they could've sued themselves over the phantom shopping-cart activity!

How could they possibly lose? (Or, for that matter, win?)

[J.G.Harston]

has a name that sounds like a law firm, not the one named after a river.

Ah! Boots, Boots, Boots & Boots.

[that one in the corner]

Now you are kipling.

By any chance, a fan of Vin Garbutt? He was a great historian of the decline of the local Teesside rud yards in the post-war period.

[T. F. M. Reader]

Early 1990s?

Somehow Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000 Server don't seem quite so old to me. Nor does Jim's "weapon of choice", Microsoft Site Server (the helpfully linked Wikipedia page confirms).

Doesn't mean the story didn't happen, of course.

[W.S.Gosset]

Timeline glitch

"early 90s" vs "His weapon of choice, Microsoft Site Server"

I think Version 2 of the latter was the first with shopping cart functionality, so that would place the story no earlier than 1997.

[El.Mich.]

Sorry for nitpicking but it obviously seems to be necessary to correcht this article

At the beginning the "early 90ies" are mentioned and then in the next sentence Windows NT 4.0, which I had used as well at this time and which, according to not only Wikipedia but lots of other sources as well

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_4.0

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-windows-nt-4

https://archive.org/details/windows-nt-4_202102

...

had only first been announced on July 31st and released to the public on August 24th, 1996.

And as a "professional nitpicker" at least I definitely cannot include the time AFTER the late summer of 1996 to the before mentioned "early 90ies". Just saying ... SCNR!