Ruthless business practice? Maybe too, but very good customer support from my point as a customer, e.g.
- a shopping cart which kept my choices forever. I remember a startup clone about 20+ years ago here in Europe, whose shopping cart automatically cleared after 24 hours. That was annoying if you wanted to look for some reviews for a book later in, before deciding to buy.
- the suggestions engine "customers who bought this also bought..." was excellent 20 years ago, especially for niche products. It helped me find a lot oft interesting music, once CDs where added to the shop.
- customer comments/reviews on products. And comments on reviews, correcting facts more often than not.
Most of this started to degrade years later. No comments on reviews any more, no downvotes on bad reviews, fake reviews, "sponsored" products "suggested" in extreme, etc.
The thing I always remember was a former colleague bought a TV from Amazon in about 2008. He got an email a few weeks later from Amazon saying that they'd refunded some of his money, as the TV had gone on sale not long after he'd bought it. That is insanely good customer service.
>I guess the fact that I mostly moved from DOS to Linux never really got me away from thinking about files and directories, and inconsistency in Android really bothers me.
Been there too. After some (maybe a lot) investigation I learned that this "inconsistency" in Android happens, because some apps use "private" directories which you (or other apps) aren't allowed to look at. Think of these as directories of user Linux users who turned off read access for others, i.e. "chmog og-r $HOME"
After finding apps like Solid Explorer and especially Termux, I learned to comprehend what's going on. But I still hate it that apps (and Android) prevent me from looking at my data the way I like to do it. For "security reasons" I not allowed to view things on my devices? Sheesh!
Nice apps like Markor or Diary (from Bill Farmer) store their data in user visible directories. As such apps exist, I tend to ignore those with limiting my access.
Interesting small creatures, which (as a side note) can have enormous ecological impacts as the Wikipedia article mentions:
"On the other hand, in the late 1980s the Western Atlantic ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi was accidentally introduced into the Black Sea and Sea of Azov via the ballast tanks of ships, and has been blamed for causing sharp drops in fish catches by eating both fish larvae and small crustaceans that would otherwise feed the adult fish."
What would be a solution to carrying lifeforms elsewhere in the ballast tanks? Turning the water over regularily to reduce the distances that these creatures can travel aboard?
I'm running my own email server for more than 20 years now. And spamassassin still works fine, filtering locally. But even before spamassassin gets stuff to analyse, my postfix server checks if a sender's ip address has a reverse dns mapping (most hacked office clients don't have one) and last but not least asks the postgrey policy server if it should accept an incoming message immediately or tell the sender to retry after some time.
That is, I'm using greylisting, and yes, this still blocks quite a number of incoming messages, as spammers do not retry to send their spam, if it doesn't work at the first attempt.
So with excellent software like Wietse Venemas Postfix and a rather restrictive setup, an email server is a low maintenance server to use IMHO.
Edit: running your own email server gives you enough email address for you and your family to make it much easier to detect phishing emails: one address per shop and you'll notice if an email to the address of a shop tries to pose as your bank or some other sender. And it's easy to block certain senders after their job is done.
Emacs with Orgmode on the desktop. That's where most of my editing work happens. And for mobile the app Markor, synced via rsync in Termux with my desktop.
Additionally the app Joplin, which syncs via WebDAV to my server and is used by both me and my wife on both desktop and mobile to share notes, shopping list, web clips etc.
Joplin is excellent for sharing but its editing capabilities leave a bit to wish for. That's where Markor comes into play. Both support Markdown, so its easy to use both.
- a shopping cart which kept my choices forever. I remember a startup clone about 20+ years ago here in Europe, whose shopping cart automatically cleared after 24 hours. That was annoying if you wanted to look for some reviews for a book later in, before deciding to buy.
- the suggestions engine "customers who bought this also bought..." was excellent 20 years ago, especially for niche products. It helped me find a lot oft interesting music, once CDs where added to the shop.
- customer comments/reviews on products. And comments on reviews, correcting facts more often than not.
Most of this started to degrade years later. No comments on reviews any more, no downvotes on bad reviews, fake reviews, "sponsored" products "suggested" in extreme, etc.