Everything you said only matters if consistently "winning" auctions is my objective. I don't consider being outbid on an item to be a loss. I throw a bid out on something I want for the amount I'm willing to pay. If I can't have it for the amount I'm willing to pay, then I don't want it. A loss is not a major inconvenience. I placed a bid which took a few seconds, and forgot about it. Once outbid, I try again on the next iteration of the item I want. Very few things sold on eBay are truly unique. Well... very few of the sort of things I would buy sight-unseen, anyway.
I do run the risk of paying slightly more if my bids prompt others to bid up the price, but it's a small risk. People who behave that irrationally are likely to outbid me and then I'm back to losing nothing.
By putting down my bid at the moment I see an item I'm interested in, I save myself the time and hassle of tracking the bid up until the final moment of the auction, and my time is worth vastly more to me than the relatively small amount of money I might save by joining the sniper game.
For example, if you want to bid $20 for something, bid $20.02 instead so if somebody else puts a bid of $20 on it, you still win.
Nice plan, except everybody in the whole goddamn world knows that trick. I've yet to see an item on eBay with any bids on it currently going for an even dollar amount. You don't even seem to know about bidding "$20.58", so you can beat out people who bid 50 cents over the dollar, or try to beat those people by a nickel, or the people who try to beat those people by a penny, or the people who try to beat those people by one more penny.
Of course, somebody else coming along bidding $21 will still hose you. Instead of playing mind games, why not just set the maximum bid to the most you're willing to pay. If that's $20.02, then fine, but if you're willing to pay $21 and not a penny over, then bid $21.
I believe it was Jerry Seinfeld who pointed out that "winning" an on-line auction simply means that you get to pay more money than anybody else in the world was willing to pay, in order to buy something the original owner doesn't even want anymore.
Re:And this is indeed a serious problem with EBay.
on
How to Win on Ebay: Snipe
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Well, the buyer has to pay more, but getting sniped at the end of the auction you really wanted sure sucks, so in that way the buyer wins.
If you "really wanted" the item, why wasn't your maximum bid price higher?
When I buy something on eBay, I always bit the most I'm willing to pay for the item. The items I win are usually nowhere close to what my maximum bid could have been, and the items I don't win sold for more than I was willing to spend.
Snipers cost people like me nothing. The only way they can hurt you is if you are compulsive spender who suddenly wants something even more just because somebody else was willing to pay $1.50 more than you originally thought it was worth.
I can't tell if you are joking or not, but The Onion is a free paper, like a lot of city weeklies. They make their money off ads alone.
If a homeless person is "selling" it, that means they grabbed a stack off one of those free newsstand racks somewhere around town in order to run a scam.
No, the iMac is the flagship model of Apple Computer, and has been ever since the first one was introduced back in the 1998 Stevenote.
Their towers are sold to developers, production labs, and a few others, but Apple is a company that sells home computers, and that means the iMac and their laptops.
I say this as an owner of a dual-G5 tower, who has an old blue-and-white G3 down in the basement and never owned an iMac. It just the way it is.
Apple does not have an Intel tower yet probably because they want to introduce their tower with the next generation of chips. Also, by migrating the "pro" machines last, they've given developers of niche production apps plenty of time to update their code to universal binaries. I'm sure they don't want the next Mac tower to be seen anything but a native-code version of Photoshop when they do their product demos.
So why not spend 20 seconds writing the letters instead of making snide comments intended to annoy the people who saw what you didn't see in it?
Because it amuses me to make a snide comment every once in a while.
I think you're confusing Futurama with Family Guy.
With you there. "Family Guy" sucks hard.
Don't feel bad, though, I didn't get Austin Powers the first time around.
Okay, I can see somebody thinking Austin Powers was not funny. It's not for everybody. But to not get Austin Powers??? It's an hour and a half of fart and dick jokes disguised as a spy-movie parody! I think you must be the first person I've ever meet to say they didn't get it right away.
That's a completely theoretical argument. Could you name some exact situations where OS X forced you to do something that was not as efficient as it could have been if they had given you multiple options?
Don't hold your breath waiting for an answer to that one.
There's also the fact that the Mac does indeed offer multiple ways of going about things, it's just that they typical Windows or Linux bigot never clicks around on a Mac long enough to discover them, choosing instead to throw up their hands and say "it's too limiting!!!1!"
Don't want to delete a file by grabbing it and dragging it to the trash? Fine, right-click (or control-click) on it, and select on "Move to trash" from the menu that pops up, just like how Windows does it. Or go to the command line and use bash commands, just like how I'm sure Linus Torvalds (a.k.a. "God Himself) would do it. You've got plenty of options, so quitcherbitchin.:P
"I just thought I'd come into a thread about a show I don't like and spend 20 seconds posting that I don't like it."
"I'm so angry I can't even remember to close my italics tag."
20 seconds? You don't give me much credit for being able to type at a reasonable speed.
Seriously, though, the "20 seconds" wasted on making a wise-assed remark about how I don't find the show to be very funny (and the additional seconds spent replying to you) pale in comparison to the 3 or 4 hours of TV viewing I spent trying very hard to give that show a fair chance, out of respect for the writers and voice talents involved.
It mostly suffered from the same disease as "The Critic" (the failed cartoon featuring the usually-funny Jon Lovitz), in that the writers seemed to think that (not so) obscure pop-culture references are automatically funny, even if they are not used to say anything funny or witty. The formula gets old very quickly.
So I ask again, not rhetorically, will it be funny this time around?
Because that would be awesome. I like it when comedies manage to be funny.
Why? Well, because the distrubution cost is very low. Much lower than the cable companies distrubution costs (i.e. maintaining their networks).
You can't possibly be serious. Broadband on-demand video cheaper than traditional broadcasting!?
If that were the case, cable and satellite TV would already be long gone by now.
The only reason it's fairly cheap at the moment is because nothing has hit YouTube or Google that is popular enough for 40 million people to want to download and/or stream it at the same time. When that day comes, Google's video servers will burn up faster than an un-recalled PowerBook 5300 running Apache that just got slashdotted.
If American Idol had 40 million viewers in the US, how many people around the world would have tuned in if it was easily accessible?
It's already seen overseas. Don't ask me how, but when I was in Japan, girls there could name just about every contestant.
Not too shabby for a show which is basically a season-long infomercial for the record label.
From the latin, "gender" is based on the word "genus" or origin. It's only fairly recently that the word has come to refer to sexual identity.
However, it's not common to use the word to distinguish between species. I think the original poster's point was joking that if you could turn a mouse into a rat (as the original headline error implied), you could probably change a woman into a man. (of vice versa.)
The thing is, gene-splicing sex changes are probably not that far down the road. Figure out just the right hormone and chemical signals to send to stem cells (adult or embrionic) and you could probably grow an entire uterus for an adult male. It's probably too late, in an adult, to turn the testicles into ovaries, but it might someday be possible to simply replace them with new ovaries grown from the patient's own DNA.
The most disgusting thing about all this is that microsoft really has abused its monopoly in all this. Even if firefox is the best browser ever, developed by volunteers and distributed freely, it is only going to get and keep 10% of the market because IE7 comes with the OS, its easy to use, and it is adequate for most people.
Those BASTARDS!
How dare they give away something to their OS customers which is easy to use and adequate for most people!
It's no fair!!!1!
Personally, I always download Firefox whenever I'm stuck on a Windows machine (which is really only on my company's computer. I use Macs for damn near everything these days), but if somebody is content with IE and wants to go on using it, good for them. It's a free country.
Say it with me now, people:
Just because I like Firefox doesn't mean you can't like IE Just because I like the Mac doesn't mean you can't like Windows Just because I like the DS Lite doesn't mean you can't like the Sony PSP Just because I like Honda motorcycles doesn't mean you can't like Harley Davisons
Don't be a hater.
Unless you are talking about the LA Lakers, the New York Yankees, or the Green Bay Packers. Hate them all you want. I sure do. ^_^
I'm basing this on Wall Street Journal articles on: HDTV, the movie you seem to despise, and the fact that a large number of the fans of said movie are: a. women and/or b. opera fans.
Noone said you had to like the movie. You asked why it was chosen. And I responded with the obvious marketing reasons why it was chosen.
1. I didn't ask why it was chosen.
2. You still haven't said what that movie has to do with opera. It sure the hell is not a "fact" that opera lovers and "Phantom of the Opera" lovers are groups which have much, if any, overlap. In fact, they are probably damn near mutually exclusive.
1. It works pretty good for a version-1 app. 2. It doesn't work well with external USB drives. 3. You get the occasional "beach ball" if you are running other apps on the OS X desktop and have only 1 GB of RAM. 4. The author is "platform agnostic" and really, really wants you to know that. 5. Rumors are flying that Apple might buy them and incorporate this into 10.5, but then again, maybe not.
Everybody who read my summary instead of clicking the link just saved 5 minutes. If a few million of you did so, I just saved a whole bunch of of entire lives!
Instead of paying for Comcast, get a simple YAGI roof antenna for over-the-air HD broadcasts.
1. They are free to tune in.
2. FOX and ABC have their prime-time shows in beautiful 720p. That covers House and Lost (the best two shows running) right there.
3. NBC and CBS have their prime-time shows in also-good 1080i.
4. PBS has a signal that is 24/7 1080i (although they just use it to re-broadcast the a Cringely TV special on how great HDTV is, a documentary on covered bridges of Iowa, and historical reality shows like "Ranch House" on heavy rotation.)
5. PBS has five other SD channels running, some of which has some cool stuff.
6. It's free to tune in.
I haven't paid a cent to either a cable or a satelite company since moving out of my apartment six years ago. Sure, it means I must wait for the DVD releases for a couple of shows I like (Battlestar Galactica, The Sopranos, etc.), and I need to download the new Doctor Who episodes off alt.binaries.drw... er... umm... I mean I need to go to a friends house and watch last year's Doctor Who on the Sci-Fi channel (Gosh, I wonder if that David Tennent guy will be any good in the role... you know... next year... when I can finally see those episodes... which I haven't seen yet. ^_^;;) but in the long run a roof antenna and a NetFlix subscription serves me far better than Cable TV ever will.
a lot of early HDTV adopters are into opera for some reason, have the sound systems to appreciate it, and might want to get it in a higher resolution format
What does HDTV appealing to opera lovers have to do with the Blu-Ray release of a shitty Andrew Lloyd Weber musical?
I would totally disagree that he is a programmer's programmer. This is the guy that brought us Lotus Notes, and then a similar product named groove. Have you ever seen any company really using Groove? And on the lotus notes side - what a nightmare. I can't even think about that software without getting the shakes. The number of problems and issues I had when I was supporting it was crazy. On top of it all the program did not work like any other windows program... Causing tons of newbie headaches. I think Microsoft is in for a rough ride...
So what you're really saying is that he's not an internal help-desk worker's programmer, because none of your points really demonstrated that he was a bad programmer, just that you didn't enjoy supporting the software from his company.
I think the guy might be a good fit. It's actually refreshing to see them going out and getting some new blood. They have a history of being a very inbred company, after all.
I COULD NOT transfer money into my paypal account until I linked a bank account
They work very hard to make it look like that is the case, but I have a single MasterCard connected to my PayPal account, and nothing else. Works fine.
It does not speak well of the state of our education system that you (probably rightly) felt the need to provide a wiki for the word "gerrymandering" in a discussion about politics.
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Everything you said only matters if consistently "winning" auctions is my objective. I don't consider being outbid on an item to be a loss. I throw a bid out on something I want for the amount I'm willing to pay. If I can't have it for the amount I'm willing to pay, then I don't want it. A loss is not a major inconvenience. I placed a bid which took a few seconds, and forgot about it. Once outbid, I try again on the next iteration of the item I want. Very few things sold on eBay are truly unique. Well... very few of the sort of things I would buy sight-unseen, anyway.
I do run the risk of paying slightly more if my bids prompt others to bid up the price, but it's a small risk. People who behave that irrationally are likely to outbid me and then I'm back to losing nothing.
By putting down my bid at the moment I see an item I'm interested in, I save myself the time and hassle of tracking the bid up until the final moment of the auction, and my time is worth vastly more to me than the relatively small amount of money I might save by joining the sniper game.
That's the cost to have it delivered to your home. I grab it from the free newstands in coffee shops, next to all the other free weekly newspapers.
For example, if you want to bid $20 for something, bid $20.02 instead so if somebody else puts a bid of $20 on it, you still win.
Nice plan, except everybody in the whole goddamn world knows that trick. I've yet to see an item on eBay with any bids on it currently going for an even dollar amount. You don't even seem to know about bidding "$20.58", so you can beat out people who bid 50 cents over the dollar, or try to beat those people by a nickel, or the people who try to beat those people by a penny, or the people who try to beat those people by one more penny.
Of course, somebody else coming along bidding $21 will still hose you. Instead of playing mind games, why not just set the maximum bid to the most you're willing to pay. If that's $20.02, then fine, but if you're willing to pay $21 and not a penny over, then bid $21.
I believe it was Jerry Seinfeld who pointed out that "winning" an on-line auction simply means that you get to pay more money than anybody else in the world was willing to pay, in order to buy something the original owner doesn't even want anymore.
Well, the buyer has to
pay more, but getting sniped at the end of the auction you really wanted sure sucks, so in that way the buyer
wins.
If you "really wanted" the item, why wasn't your maximum bid price higher?
When I buy something on eBay, I always bit the most I'm willing to pay for the item. The items I win are usually nowhere close to what my maximum bid could have been, and the items I don't win sold for more than I was willing to spend.
Snipers cost people like me nothing. The only way they can hurt you is if you are compulsive spender who suddenly wants something even more just because somebody else was willing to pay $1.50 more than you originally thought it was worth.
excavation for the interstate system has moved enough material to bury the State of Connecticut knee-deep in dirt.
That one would not have been a bad move, either.
I can't tell if you are joking or not, but The Onion is a free paper, like a lot of city weeklies. They make their money off ads alone.
If a homeless person is "selling" it, that means they grabbed a stack off one of those free newsstand racks somewhere around town in order to run a scam.
The article repeatedly uses the word "many", but doesn't tell us what numbers they mean by "many".
More than three.
Directions to a shelter is being helpful. Giving a panhandler cash usually is not.
If you want to give, donate to a charity that takes care of the homeless.
Its the flagship model!
No, the iMac is the flagship model of Apple Computer, and has been ever since the first one was introduced back in the 1998 Stevenote.
Their towers are sold to developers, production labs, and a few others, but Apple is a company that sells home computers, and that means the iMac and their laptops.
I say this as an owner of a dual-G5 tower, who has an old blue-and-white G3 down in the basement and never owned an iMac. It just the way it is.
Apple does not have an Intel tower yet probably because they want to introduce their tower with the next generation of chips. Also, by migrating the "pro" machines last, they've given developers of niche production apps plenty of time to update their code to universal binaries. I'm sure they don't want the next Mac tower to be seen anything but a native-code version of Photoshop when they do their product demos.
So why not spend 20 seconds writing the letters instead of making snide comments intended to annoy the people who saw what you didn't see in it?
Because it amuses me to make a snide comment every once in a while.
I think you're confusing Futurama with Family Guy.
With you there. "Family Guy" sucks hard.
Don't feel bad, though, I didn't get Austin Powers the first time around.
Okay, I can see somebody thinking Austin Powers was not funny. It's not for everybody. But to not get Austin Powers??? It's an hour and a half of fart and dick jokes disguised as a spy-movie parody! I think you must be the first person I've ever meet to say they didn't get it right away.
That's a completely theoretical argument. Could you name some exact situations where OS X forced you to do something that was not as efficient as it could have been if they had given you multiple options?
:P
Don't hold your breath waiting for an answer to that one.
There's also the fact that the Mac does indeed offer multiple ways of going about things, it's just that they typical Windows or Linux bigot never clicks around on a Mac long enough to discover them, choosing instead to throw up their hands and say "it's too limiting!!!1!"
Don't want to delete a file by grabbing it and dragging it to the trash? Fine, right-click (or control-click) on it, and select on "Move to trash" from the menu that pops up, just like how Windows does it. Or go to the command line and use bash commands, just like how I'm sure Linus Torvalds (a.k.a. "God Himself) would do it. You've got plenty of options, so quitcherbitchin.
Springfield is clearly a midwest American town with an ocean port.
Which is the same thing as saying it's everywhere and nowhere.
"I'm so angry I can't even remember to close my italics tag."
20 seconds? You don't give me much credit for being able to type at a reasonable speed.
Seriously, though, the "20 seconds" wasted on making a wise-assed remark about how I don't find the show to be very funny (and the additional seconds spent replying to you) pale in comparison to the 3 or 4 hours of TV viewing I spent trying very hard to give that show a fair chance, out of respect for the writers and voice talents involved.
It mostly suffered from the same disease as "The Critic" (the failed cartoon featuring the usually-funny Jon Lovitz), in that the writers seemed to think that (not so) obscure pop-culture references are automatically funny, even if they are not used to say anything funny or witty. The formula gets old very quickly.
So I ask again, not rhetorically, will it be funny this time around?
Because that would be awesome. I like it when comedies manage to be funny.
Why? Well, because the distrubution cost is very low. Much lower than the cable companies distrubution costs (i.e. maintaining their networks).
You can't possibly be serious. Broadband on-demand video cheaper than traditional broadcasting!?
If that were the case, cable and satellite TV would already be long gone by now.
The only reason it's fairly cheap at the moment is because nothing has hit YouTube or Google that is popular enough for 40 million people to want to download and/or stream it at the same time. When that day comes, Google's video servers will burn up faster than an un-recalled PowerBook 5300 running Apache that just got slashdotted.
If American Idol had 40 million viewers in the US, how many people around the world would have tuned in if it was easily accessible?
It's already seen overseas. Don't ask me how, but when I was in Japan, girls there could name just about every contestant.
Not too shabby for a show which is basically a season-long infomercial for the record label.
Hey, that's terrific.
Will they make it funny this time around?
From the latin, "gender" is based on the word "genus" or origin. It's only fairly recently that the word has come to refer to sexual identity.
However, it's not common to use the word to distinguish between species. I think the original poster's point was joking that if you could turn a mouse into a rat (as the original headline error implied), you could probably change a woman into a man. (of vice versa.)
The thing is, gene-splicing sex changes are probably not that far down the road. Figure out just the right hormone and chemical signals to send to stem cells (adult or embrionic) and you could probably grow an entire uterus for an adult male. It's probably too late, in an adult, to turn the testicles into ovaries, but it might someday be possible to simply replace them with new ovaries grown from the patient's own DNA.
The most disgusting thing about all this is that microsoft really has abused its monopoly in all this. Even if firefox is the best browser ever, developed by volunteers and distributed freely, it is only going to get and keep 10% of the market because IE7 comes with the OS, its easy to use, and it is adequate for most people.
Those BASTARDS!
How dare they give away something to their OS customers which is easy to use and adequate for most people!
It's no fair!!!1!
Personally, I always download Firefox whenever I'm stuck on a Windows machine (which is really only on my company's computer. I use Macs for damn near everything these days), but if somebody is content with IE and wants to go on using it, good for them. It's a free country.
Say it with me now, people:
Just because I like Firefox doesn't mean you can't like IE
Just because I like the Mac doesn't mean you can't like Windows
Just because I like the DS Lite doesn't mean you can't like the Sony PSP
Just because I like Honda motorcycles doesn't mean you can't like Harley Davisons
Don't be a hater.
Unless you are talking about the LA Lakers, the New York Yankees, or the Green Bay Packers. Hate them all you want. I sure do. ^_^
I'm basing this on Wall Street Journal articles on: HDTV, the movie you seem to despise, and the fact that a large number of the fans of said movie are: a. women and/or b. opera fans.
Noone said you had to like the movie. You asked why it was chosen. And I responded with the obvious marketing reasons why it was chosen.
1. I didn't ask why it was chosen.
2. You still haven't said what that movie has to do with opera. It sure the hell is not a "fact" that opera lovers and "Phantom of the Opera" lovers are groups which have much, if any, overlap. In fact, they are probably damn near mutually exclusive.
Everything TFA has to say.
1. It works pretty good for a version-1 app.
2. It doesn't work well with external USB drives.
3. You get the occasional "beach ball" if you are running other apps on the OS X desktop and have only 1 GB of RAM.
4. The author is "platform agnostic" and really, really wants you to know that.
5. Rumors are flying that Apple might buy them and incorporate this into 10.5, but then again, maybe not.
Everybody who read my summary instead of clicking the link just saved 5 minutes. If a few million of you did so, I just saved a whole bunch of of entire lives!
Instead of paying for Comcast, get a simple YAGI roof antenna for over-the-air HD broadcasts.
1. They are free to tune in.
2. FOX and ABC have their prime-time shows in beautiful 720p. That covers House and Lost (the best two shows running) right there.
3. NBC and CBS have their prime-time shows in also-good 1080i.
4. PBS has a signal that is 24/7 1080i (although they just use it to re-broadcast the a Cringely TV special on how great HDTV is, a documentary on covered bridges of Iowa, and historical reality shows like "Ranch House" on heavy rotation.)
5. PBS has five other SD channels running, some of which has some cool stuff.
6. It's free to tune in.
I haven't paid a cent to either a cable or a satelite company since moving out of my apartment six years ago. Sure, it means I must wait for the DVD releases for a couple of shows I like (Battlestar Galactica, The Sopranos, etc.), and I need to download the new Doctor Who episodes off alt.binaries.drw... er... umm... I mean I need to go to a friends house and watch last year's Doctor Who on the Sci-Fi channel (Gosh, I wonder if that David Tennent guy will be any good in the role... you know... next year... when I can finally see those episodes... which I haven't seen yet. ^_^;;) but in the long run a roof antenna and a NetFlix subscription serves me far better than Cable TV ever will.
a lot of early HDTV adopters are into opera for some reason, have the sound systems to appreciate it, and might want to get it in a higher resolution format
What does HDTV appealing to opera lovers have to do with the Blu-Ray release of a shitty Andrew Lloyd Weber musical?
I would totally disagree that he is a programmer's programmer. This is the guy that brought us Lotus Notes, and then a similar product named groove. Have you ever seen any company really using Groove? And on the lotus notes side - what a nightmare. I can't even think about that software without getting the shakes. The number of problems and issues I had when I was supporting it was crazy. On top of it all the program did not work like any other windows program... Causing tons of newbie headaches. I think Microsoft is in for a rough ride...
So what you're really saying is that he's not an internal help-desk worker's programmer, because none of your points really demonstrated that he was a bad programmer, just that you didn't enjoy supporting the software from his company.
I think the guy might be a good fit. It's actually refreshing to see them going out and getting some new blood. They have a history of being a very inbred company, after all.
Frozen H2O is called "ice."
Liquid H2O is called "water."
Water is wet.
I COULD NOT transfer money into my paypal account until I linked a bank account
They work very hard to make it look like that is the case, but I have a single MasterCard connected to my PayPal account, and nothing else. Works fine.
It does not speak well of the state of our education system that you (probably rightly) felt the need to provide a wiki for the word "gerrymandering" in a discussion about politics.