Slashback: Sex, Freiheit, Differentiation

Here it is again. Back atcha with stuff on ... the actual sex of Tjisana M. Lewis and other foul-ups; Richard Stallman's back-in-proportion response to the out-of-same brouhaha over licensing of KDE; and a reaction to the announcment last week of a fully-preemptive kernel. Not to mention a few followups to the piece Rob posted last week about Amazon's interesting pricing policies.

Shouldn't this be one of those fields marked "required" on e-mail? Tjisana M. Lewis wrote: "Just one minor issue though in case we meet again - I (Product Manager with titles ad nauseaum) am male." (I had written -- with the famous line about 'what happens when you assume' nowhere in mind -- that "she sent the following response ..." regarding the new HP printserver which as of now does not support printing from Linux clients.) With apologies and thanks for the correction, I await the beating with wet noodles. declan points out another goof for which I must shoulder the blame: the judge in question in the DeCSS case is Lewis Kaplan, not Chaplain, as rendered in this story of last week.

Calling Tim Theisen, calling Tim Theisen to the white courtesy telephone ... Richard M. Stallman can't win. At least, that's the impression one gets sometimes from hearing the reactions he draws for saying nearly anything. Critical or glowing, the man says what's on his mind, and there's plenty on it. Including, of late, plenty about GNOME and KDE. As usual, the whole story is both more complex and more satisfying when you know more about it. Several readers pointed at Stallman's response at LinuxToday to the criticism he recieved (both official and unofficial) after he said "Making Qt available under the GPL makes it legal to take an existing GPL-covered program and adapt it to work with Qt." As a happy user of both KDE and GNOME, I must say RMS sounds pretty reasonable to me.

And a special deal for our guests from AOL -- Two bridges! Amazon says: don't worry! It's just an accident! jeko writes "Amazon.com just sent me an email claiming that their different prices for different customers are merely a mistake."

He cites email from a customer rep at Amazon:

"Finally, at any given time, despite our best efforts, a small number of the more than 4.7 million items on our site may be mispriced.

Kristine Jorgensen, Amazon.com"

"So, there you go. This latest PR row is all just a 'mispricing.' I wish my customers would let me get away with that."

Meanwhile, Amazon is apparently not the only company to play cookie-based pricing games ... An unnamed correspondent writes: "[...] Similar to your story on Amazon.com regarding price differences, I think I've found a similar ploy on flyfrontier.com. I've been checking flights from Washington, DC to Denver, CO. When I first checked prices, the flight came back at $400. Several minutes later, the same flight was priced at over $500. When I switched computers, the same thing happened again: The price on the same flight was $400 in the first instance, and over $500 on the second. Then, I switched browsers ... it happened again. When I cleared my history and disabled cookies, I was able to recreate the price difference again. Try it and see for yourself. So, what's up with this? What is the advantage of switching prices around? Has this practice become widespread on the web?"

You have exactly 15ms to complete your response ... Go. Rick Lehrbaum writes "Victor Yodaiken, creator of RTLinux, has provided a brief statement about MontaVista Software's recent announcement of a hard real-time Linux (MontaVista, it should be noted, supports both RTLinux and the new kernel preemption technology.) In his response, Yodaiken draws significant distinctions between the architectural approaches taken by each (RTLinux; kernel preemptability), provides a technical perspective on the usefulness of each, and mentions some issues that need to be considered in proceeding along a kernel preemption path (which he does *not* summarily dismiss). Yodaiken claims that under RTLinux, "real-time software can communicate with Linux through fifos, shared memory, or signals but still gets hardware speed interrupt latencies, RTLinux worst case interrupt latencies are 15 microseconds on a generic x86 and better on PowerPC and Alphas." Additional detailed background on RTLinux appears in this interesting interview with Yodaiken (including info about "the infamous RTLinux patent")."

Comments

Hello? A *small* number, out of 4.7 million total

[Water Paradox]

Please read the original before a hundred people misquote it. Why aren't moderators catching this? The fact is that Amazon admits to mispricing on a small number of their total 4.7 million prices. Sounds fair to me, given the fact that anyone who is selling that many things is never going to get my business because the threshhold for decent human interactions decreases dramatically after 1.2 million items sold... :-)

Also, the point that Amazon is probably not scamming, that they have the right to set whatever price they want--it is us who choose whether to buy--is valid. The original fact is useful, but is not itself an indicator of whether Amazon is evil and tyrannical like, say, MicroSoft or WalMart which use their power to buy competition outright to define the market, that being a whole 'nuther issue.

-Water Paradox

Re:I still don't see why people get all bent

[sillysally]

Why does what they are charging other people even come into the equation?

because it is information about the producers pricing function that you didn't have before.

Is a certain item that worth say, $15.49 to you, suddenly become worth only $14.49 to you because they are selling it to someone else for that much?

well, this is sort of obvious: people want the lowest price they can get. Duh. In Econ101 this concept is expressed as "consumer surplus".

• If I would pay $30 for something, but I can get it for $20, I'm in a sense $10 worth of happy. The integral of all of the consumers and how extra happy they are is called the "consumer surplus", and it directly measures half of what is so good about free markets.
• The other half applies to sellers. If they would sell it for $10, but they can get $20, the producer surplus would be said to be $10 also.
• (BTW, The exact same math applies to controlled markets, but if the price or quantity deviates from the "market clearing price" the total size of the surpluses comes out less than maximum. This is why it is wrong for the government to "fix" the price of oil during shortages... overall happiness goes down.)

If a seller can determine exactly how much you are willing to pay and "price discriminate" to single you out, they can turn your surplus into their surplus. This keeps the overall "happiness" (economists call it "utility") the same, but it will also lead to your being less happy, and that's what we may be seeing here.

I say may be because people are making the assumption that the low price is "right" price and the high one is the "wrong" one. What Amazon may be trying to do is not figure out how much each individual will pay, but they may be trying to figure out what the average price should be, by experimenting with different random prices. Probably they are lying though, IMHO, and trying to screw each person on an individual basis. It fits in with some of the other stuff they've done, the one-click patent, changing the terms of the privacy agreement, etc.

Re:Ouch!

[craw]

I think it must be something like what happened to John Bobbitt (aka Magic Johnson). You know the song.

In the bedroom, the quiet bedroom, John Bobbitt sleeps tonight.
In the kitchen, the quiet kitchen, Lorena grabs a knife.
A wiener whack, a wiener whack, ...

Re:Ha! RMS does it once again.

[update()]

I had the same thoughts when I first read that article yesterday. I get the impression, though, that RMS genuinely was trying to be friendly and conciliatory, but suffers from a total lack of social skills. Probably this new response should be interpreted as, "I apologize if people misunderstood what I wrote last week. I meant to applaud Troll Tech and to put to rest any lingering tensions between the FSF community and the Qt/KDE developers."

Anyway, enough of this stuff. KDE 2 RC1 is now tagged and coming soon -- if people have pent-up energy, they can direct it into bug reports.

---------

Re:They're bent for a good reason

[sigwinch]

Because it's illegal. Charging different prices to different people ... is considered anti-competive and is a BIG no-no ...

Illegal? On my planet, it is not only legal, it's standard operating procedure. For instance, my people hold these things called "yard sales" where prices are negotiated based on the purchaser's willingness to pay and the seller's assessment of their ability to wheedle more money out of the purchaser. ;-)

Seriously, I don't understand why everybody's upset about Amazon's pricing. At worst, they are just determining the price elasticity curve of the market. Remember that all book and CD prices are totally arbitrary anyway. For example, the non-recurring expenses for production of a twenty year old music album have been paid for. Amazon's sole recurring expense for a CD is fixed (and much smaller than $1). Yet Seargent Pepper's Lonley Hearts Club Band (Beatles) costs $11.99, while Lost In The Ozone (Command Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen) costs $9.97. Given identical marginal cost of production, why is the Beatles album 20% more expensive? Because that's what the market will bear.

<slashdot>Come on, people. It ain't called the bazaar for nothing!</slashdot>

Now, if RTLinux was used in a blender,

[jailbrekr2]

would it hang if you didn't respond after 15.4mS?

If you don't get it, read the Metric Tonnes of Quickies.....

Stop this silliness! Was:Cookie Costs

[pod]

Before this uninformed/misinformed post and ensuing discussion get moderated too far (oops! too late!) lets inject some reason into the thread.

Unless your shopping cart was coded by a total moron, the price will never be stored in the cookie. Even more to the point, the products you have in your shopping cart will never be stored in the cookie.

Your cookie is merely a ticket, an anonymous id if you will. A magic number. A security token. Get it yet?

The cookie has an id value (key into a db or a hash of one, usually a 32 char guid) and the db on the server saves the actual shopping cart data and is pointed to by the cookie. See, if you have db laying around handily, it is actually much easier and more intuitive to save the shopping cart on the database. You can query it, run reports, etc... you just get more flexibility. Not to mention security.

Only 2-bit amateur shopping carts would be susceptible to such a lame and trivial attack.

Ouch!

[MWoody]

So, after a 'slashback', she's now a he?

Ouch...
---

Criticizing Stallman

[Arandir]

the criticism he recieved ... after he said "Making Qt available under the GPL makes it legal to take an existing GPL-covered program and adapt it to work with Qt."

Uh, Timothy? Where have you been? The criticism was not directed at the statement you quoted. 99% of it was directed at his "forgiveness" and the remaining 1% directed at the "go GNOME" statement. I don't recall anyone bitching about Stallman's announcement of Qt under the GPL.

Amazon - New Shopping Innovation?

[Redking]

Amazon has taken its fair-share of heat on Slashdot. I remember that the uproar when Amazon patented "one-click shopping". IMHO, that was well deserved, but Amazon has invented new shopping "technologies" that I like.

I definitely like the wish lists. It's easy to add stuff to my wish list and update it when I purchase something. Also, it's nice to be able to publish wish lists and read other's wish lists especially when you want to surprise a loved one with a gift. Also, I like the Amazon Purchase Circles. It's interesting to browse the Purchase Circles and find out what books the Microserfs are buying.

This latest instant price changing incident is perhaps the latest Amazon shopping innovation being tested. Brick and mortar stores change prices often and track their customer purchase habits with all the specialty card programs. Amazon just has the luxury of changing prices at "Internet speed" simply because they ARE the largest retail store on the Internet.

This is a classic example of market manipulation and how the Internet is changing the ideals of traditional retail. If you don't like it, there are plenty of choices. Nobody is forcing you to purchase items at Amazon's prices. Everytime you purchase something on Amazon you do so at your own free will, at the price stated. If you don't like the price, then don't buy it. There are plenty of places to do some comparison shopping if you don't like Amazon. I use PriceScan.

Regarding the Amazon customer service, they are probably just doing some damage control. Amazon's main customer service center is in North Dakota and they're probably not up to speed on the plans at the Seattle headquarters. I take everything customer service says with a grain of salt.

More on price switching...

[supabeast!]

Price switching is nothing new. Most mail order firms have been doing this with catalogs for years. They will send one catalog to people who haven't bought anything in a few years, and another to people who have bought recently. Item numbers in the catalogs will then have a different prefix and higher prices for old customers. If you tell the people who take your order that you want the "new customer" price, they will often give you the lower price.

Even more recently, I recieved a catalog that sold the same ornamental bird house in two areas of the same catalog, but for $10 more in one area of the catalog than in another.

This is just another old marketing gimmick that made its way onto the net.