HBP now releasing 7/15 instead of 7/17

Bah! Why'd WB have to go and move the release date of HBP again? (Real answer: it's summer and weekdays act a lot like weekends = more box office on opening week.) Don't get me wrong, the earlier the better in one sense, but as far as Azkatraz, I'm going to lose all the personal cred I would have given myself for my very first costumed geeky opening-day midnight viewing of any movie ever. There's little point bothering to go see it a couple days earlier, either, because most of the fun was going to be sharing that fact with a bunch of other obsessed fans, and now I'm not going to be. Feh.

HBP now releasing 7/15 instead of 7/17

Bah! Why'd WB have to go and move the release date of HBP again? (Real answer: it's summer and weekdays act a lot like weekends = more box office on opening week.) Don't get me wrong, the earlier the better in one sense, but as far as Azkatraz, I'm going to lose all the personal cred I would have given myself for my very first costumed geeky opening-day midnight viewing of any movie ever. There's little point bothering to go see it a couple days earlier, either, because most of the fun was going to be sharing that fact with a bunch of other obsessed fans, and now I'm not going to be. Feh.

(no subject)

Okay, my own input on "Amazonfail" here.

As a cataloger myself, I can tell you that it is possible for a technical screw-up to cause the observed result. Without knowing more about Amazon's database I could not tell you how, precisely. (Even with knowing some more, it would probably be obscure to me as I doubt they are running Unicorn, so what I am about to describe is a hypothetical situation based on my own experiences.) On our own it would be something like "misconfigure a report that globally does something to subject heading indexes", which is easy to do if you are not scrupulously careful because there are lots of fiddly little options on many reports even in the GUI; those who venture to home-cook API scripts without first consulting Customer Care, beware!

I don't know if this was necessarily subject-category related (it could be some kind of invisible internal tagging Amazon applies, for instance), but if it was, since many books have multiple subject headings it is plausible to me that something some programmer did somewhere affected only certain titles that had the right "lucky" one or two, even while they happened to share subjects three and four or whatever with other titles, so the effect was that only part of the pool was masked.

NB I am not saying there is no problem here, merely that I think remarks like "nuh-uh, it was awfully selective to be just a mistake!" are underinformed about what is possible to occur with massive book databases.

(no subject)

Okay, my own input on "Amazonfail" here.

As a cataloger myself, I can tell you that it is possible for a technical screw-up to cause the observed result. Without knowing more about Amazon's database I could not tell you how, precisely. (Even with knowing some more, it would probably be obscure to me as I doubt they are running Unicorn, so what I am about to describe is a hypothetical situation based on my own experiences.) On our own it would be something like "misconfigure a report that globally does something to subject heading indexes", which is easy to do if you are not scrupulously careful because there are lots of fiddly little options on many reports even in the GUI; those who venture to home-cook API scripts without first consulting Customer Care, beware!

I don't know if this was necessarily subject-category related (it could be some kind of invisible internal tagging Amazon applies, for instance), but if it was, since many books have multiple subject headings it is plausible to me that something some programmer did somewhere affected only certain titles that had the right "lucky" one or two, even while they happened to share subjects three and four or whatever with other titles, so the effect was that only part of the pool was masked.

NB I am not saying there is no problem here, merely that I think remarks like "nuh-uh, it was awfully selective to be just a mistake!" are underinformed about what is possible to occur with massive book databases.