There has been a recent tendency (especially on sites like ebaY) to under-price the items for sale, and make a profit on shipping. On ebaY, this is done primarily to avoid the excessive listing and final-value fees, which don't include shipping.
Because many folks dislike that practice, I always quote fixed-price shipping, and try to price it so that it just barely covers the actual cost of shipping materials and postage. Since I make my profit on the item, and not the shipping, I can afford to give large breaks to people who order more than one item.
My favorite site (for now) is www.blujay.com
I am currently finishing out my career as a programmer, and plan to be dealing in musical instruments and accessories full time by the end of 2006.
ebaY has gone from being the online fleamarket to being the online outlet mall. The smaller sellers are being gouged, and ebaY is actively trying to eliminate them in favor of large-ticket items which make more money for the same bandwidth.
ebaY currently does not have any viable competition, although there is no shortage of upstarts that come and go. I do list stuff on ebaY, because it's where most of the buyers are. But I also list on alternate sites (like BluJay.com) because they are less expensive to use (and I offer lower prices on alternative sites). I see that Yahoo! auctions has just eliminated listing fees, so I may give them a try, too.
PayPal is another issue -- There is really nothing wrong with either ebaY or PayPal that a healthy dose of meaningful competition would not completely cure in a heartbeat. Which is why I'm eager to see the new online payment system that Google plans to introduce this year.
Speaking of which, I think that the business model of Froogle will eventually force ebaY to go back to its original niche as the online fleamarket.
I have several email accounts. The ones that I have through my ISP get a few dozen spams a day, on the order of about 5% of my email. Just for grins, I set up a completely unfiltered account using my own hosting service, and attached it to PopFile (a free Bayesian filtering program for email) to see the relative spam load. It is roughly 98% spam, or roughly 500 spams/day. I use that address for some mailing list subscriptions, and it is posted on my hosting service site, which probably where it got harvested. Unfortunately, PopFile is still getting some false positives, so I still check the spam bucket for improperly marked messages. (I'm definitely looking for something that won't give me false positives; I would rather get a small amount of spam than lose any legitimate messages.)
From your description, I would guess that your ISP is nuking most of the spam before you see it.
It's because business finds it much more convenient to unfairly require employees to compete constantly for their own jobs.
They will be increasingly required to compete with H1-B workers who will put up with illegal working conditions because they have no recourse. The H1-B's come in because businesses lobby (and bribe) their congresscritters to provide more workers because "there aren't enough programmers", and the domestic programmer pool shrinks because domestic workers don't want to work 18-hour days for $36k a year. I still occasionally teach programming classes (but I now sell insurance for a living; I'd rather write software, but I can't afford to), and I advise all of my students to find something else for a career, because programming will be a minimum-wage pursuit by the end of this decade.
Times change, and we will simply have to find something to do for a living that can't (or won't) be outsourced.
As the above poster has guessed, the real reason that 50% of IT jobs will go away over the next decade is US policy that allows (and encourages) abuse of H1-B workers. Since I wasn't able to complete with slave labor, I am now selling insurance for a living. Among my hottest-selling items is a simplified inexpensive health policy for H1-B workers who arrive in this country and find that the shop charges very high rates for health insurance -- if it is offered at all.
I think that 50% is a low estimate. Programming will be a minimum-wage McJob by the end of this decade.
Where you CS degree came from won't mean squat in 8 to 10 years. By then, programming will be a McJob, done mainly by H1-b programmers under slave-labor conditions.
I'm a US citizen, but my last contract was with an H1b sweatshop, as the token citizen they have to hire to look like they really hire citizens (in a city with over 5000 unemployed programmers at least as qualified as I am, I was one of *3* citizens in a group of over 150 H1b's). I was there on a Friday evening about 5:15, when the supervisor came in and announced that there would be a mandantory staff meeting at 7:00 that evening. This sort of thing was fairly common, because the H1b slaves, er, contractors, knew that if they didn't submit to this sort of arbitrary abuse, they would be on their ways back to their home countries immediately. Most of them routinely put in more than 12 hours/day.
My reply, in front of all the slaves, er, H1b's, was, "If you want me to be present at a staff meeting, you can schedule it during working hours." Then I left, amid several gasps.
The next Monday, I emailed my supervisor, and his supervisor, a excerpt from the employee manual, which outlined the official working hours (8-5, M-F) At that point, I also quit putting in *any* 'casual' overtime (they explicitly refused to pay overtime on my contract).
It took them about 3 more weeks, but I could see they were carefully "documenting" reasons to fire me. After all, I was setting a really bad example for the serfs, er, 'guest' workers. But since I wasn't an H1b, they had to go to a lot more trouble to get rid of me. They started assigning me tasks that could not possibly be completed in normal 40-hour weeks, and then documenting my "lack of performance".
I quit. There are situations that I just find too sickening to tolerate, and this is one of them.
The company is a "well known telecom company" located in Irving, TX.
If you are coming to the US to work with an H1b visa, that's what you have to look forward to. Be sure to line up at least 3 roommates, so that you can afford to get an apartment walking distance from the job, because you won't be making enough money to afford the use of an automobile -- the 'good' salary they quoted you is not going to be quite as good as you expected. And the walk needs to be a short one, because you will be spending 12 to 15 hours/day at the job.
I'm now selling insurance for a living. Programming is going to be a McJob by the end of this decade, thanks in large part to US government policies that encourage the abuse of H1b workers.
But the original statement said "I decided to pay the extra money to have email for the domain I registered" WFT?! Go to something like directnic.com, get your domain for $15/yr and get mail forwarding included (including wildcard)!
I recall seeing this around 1977 in Byte Magazine. I was on a graphics project for a military contractor at the time, and we submitted this to my supervisor as a joke. He thought it was funny, but *his* boss didn't...
A bandsaw is commonly used to cut meat in butcher shops. I'm guessing that this device would not work on that application.
Also, gotta wonder if this sort of thing might actually *increase* the number of injuries from power cutting equipment -- by reducing the level of respect for the destruction power of the equipment. Sorta like some of the safety features of automobiles has led to some folks driving more agressively...
A cursory reading of the site shows that somebody *really* needs to learn more about effective copywriting. Even if the idea had some merit (it doesn't), the website does a piss poor job of presenting the case. It sure doesn't inspire *me* to want to use the service!
If I were a Venture Capitalist, and somebody came to me looking for VC with something as poorly thought out as this, his ass would hit the middle of the parking lot by at least the second bounce.
The original poster is in the UK. In the UK, there is no right to self defense. There may actually be some provision for self defense somewhere in their law, but from recent news stories out of the UK, anyone who successfully defends himself against an armed criminal in the UK will face stiffer penalties than the criminal.
There are places in the US that have effectively repealed the 2nd amendment. The result has always been an *increase* in violent crime. The two states that have the lowest per capita gun crimes are Vermont and Alaska -- the two states that do not require any permit to carry a concealed handgun.
I personally carry a gun, everywhere that it is legal (and I avoid places where I can't legally carry my gun).
I'm an insurance agent. If you skip your morning coffee before a paramedic exam (typically administered when buying large face amounts of life insurance), your BP reading will be 5-10 points lower than if you don't skip it.
I checked that one personally. I can believe that long-term usage doesn't necessarily increase hypertension, but the short-term effects certainly would make it appear to!
BTW, as I mentioned elsewhere, Science News ran a recent article on coffee, and found some health enhancements -- for decaf.
How you can actually drink Folgers is quite beyond me.
Agreed.
The folks at coffeegeeks use the term "Folgerization" to indicate the process of reduction of quality in small steps, eventually resulting in total crud.
Personally I'll stick to my Dunkin' Donuts fresh ground coffee brewed in a french press (freedom press?).
Funny you should mention Dunkin' Donuts. They are the largest retailer of coffee in the world. *$ is a distant 2nd (IIRC).
Being on a low-carb diet, the coffee is about the only thing that I get at DD. But I go there for coffee because it's better than the burnt stuff at *$ -- when I go to *$, I go to meet somebody, and I don't drink their coffee (they sell enough to other folks that my lack of consumption doesn't seem to bother them a bit). As I mentioned elsewhere, I am in awe of the marketing prowess that made an overpriced small cup of burnt coffee into a status symbol.
It's been my experience here in Seattle (home to Starbucks) that most folks are ordering lattes, caramel machiattos, mochas, etc. than a regular cup o' joe.
At *$, that's largely because it takes a substantial amount of sugar and other additives to mask the aftertaste of improperly roasted (burnt) beans. Once I got used to premium coffees (I have even gone to the trouble of roasting my own), I discovered that drinking it plain could be a real treat.
They also have decaf... and the only times I have ever had *$ coffee, I had decaf. Reckon that's why I never got hooked?
Doubtful. I like premium (properly) fresh-roasted coffee enough that I got into the coffee business myself, but I still drink more decaf than regular.
Note that *$ is not a coffee company. It's a place to go to meet somebody company that happens to sell coffee. I went there just last week to meet somebody. I didn't drink any of their excuse for coffee, but the guy that I met with did.
I am somewhat in awe of the marketing prowess that made a small, overpriced cup of burnt coffee into a status symbol.
I'm guessing that the PC hamster cage was suggested by this news article: Fat Hamster in Printer Sparks Rescue
Apr 1, 7:45 am ET
BERLIN (Reuters) - A hamster called "Teddy" sparked a police rescue mission after he climbed inside a computer printer and got stuck because he was too fat to get out again, authorities said Wednesday. (rest of article can be found on www.iwon.com)
Given the date, I gotta wonder if either is for real.
I just got back from a walk around the building where I work. Sunny, mild breeze, low 70's (F). Gorgeous day. Too nice to spend all of it sitting in front of a computer screen.
It's not necessarily music, but other draws to the business. They already provide a place to meet & socialize and/or sell, and access the internet. Starbucks is not really even in the *coffee* business; it's just one of the incidental profit centers. Good thing too; they would never make it just on the merits of their coffee; they depend on customers for whom coffee is just an indifferent-tasting warm brown liquid used primarily as a delivery mechanism for caffeine and sugar.
Slashdot Mirror
Alan Kay is obviously "overqualified".
There has been a recent tendency (especially on sites like ebaY) to under-price the items for sale, and make a profit on shipping. On ebaY, this is done primarily to avoid the excessive listing and final-value fees, which don't include shipping.
Because many folks dislike that practice, I always quote fixed-price shipping, and try to price it so that it just barely covers the actual cost of shipping materials and postage. Since I make my profit on the item, and not the shipping, I can afford to give large breaks to people who order more than one item.
My favorite site (for now) is www.blujay.com
I am currently finishing out my career as a programmer, and plan to be dealing in musical instruments and accessories full time by the end of 2006.
ebaY has gone from being the online fleamarket to being the online outlet mall. The smaller sellers are being gouged, and ebaY is actively trying to eliminate them in favor of large-ticket items which make more money for the same bandwidth.
ebaY currently does not have any viable competition, although there is no shortage of upstarts that come and go. I do list stuff on ebaY, because it's where most of the buyers are. But I also list on alternate sites (like BluJay.com) because they are less expensive to use (and I offer lower prices on alternative sites). I see that Yahoo! auctions has just eliminated listing fees, so I may give them a try, too.
PayPal is another issue -- There is really nothing wrong with either ebaY or PayPal that a healthy dose of meaningful competition would not completely cure in a heartbeat. Which is why I'm eager to see the new online payment system that Google plans to introduce this year.
Speaking of which, I think that the business model of Froogle will eventually force ebaY to go back to its original niche as the online fleamarket.
I applied for a programming position with my local county. I'm on their waiting list.
Since December 2001.
I have several email accounts. The ones that I have through my ISP get a few dozen spams a day, on the order of about 5% of my email. Just for grins, I set up a completely unfiltered account using my own hosting service, and attached it to PopFile (a free Bayesian filtering program for email) to see the relative spam load. It is roughly 98% spam, or roughly 500 spams/day. I use that address for some mailing list subscriptions, and it is posted on my hosting service site, which probably where it got harvested. Unfortunately, PopFile is still getting some false positives, so I still check the spam bucket for improperly marked messages. (I'm definitely looking for something that won't give me false positives; I would rather get a small amount of spam than lose any legitimate messages.)
From your description, I would guess that your ISP is nuking most of the spam before you see it.
It's because business finds it much more convenient to unfairly require employees to compete constantly for their own jobs.
They will be increasingly required to compete with H1-B workers who will put up with illegal working conditions because they have no recourse. The H1-B's come in because businesses lobby (and bribe) their congresscritters to provide more workers because "there aren't enough programmers", and the domestic programmer pool shrinks because domestic workers don't want to work 18-hour days for $36k a year. I still occasionally teach programming classes (but I now sell insurance for a living; I'd rather write software, but I can't afford to), and I advise all of my students to find something else for a career, because programming will be a minimum-wage pursuit by the end of this decade.
Times change, and we will simply have to find something to do for a living that can't (or won't) be outsourced.
As the above poster has guessed, the real reason that 50% of IT jobs will go away over the next decade is US policy that allows (and encourages) abuse of H1-B workers. Since I wasn't able to complete with slave labor, I am now selling insurance for a living. Among my hottest-selling items is a simplified inexpensive health policy for H1-B workers who arrive in this country and find that the shop charges very high rates for health insurance -- if it is offered at all.
I think that 50% is a low estimate. Programming will be a minimum-wage McJob by the end of this decade.
Where you CS degree came from won't mean squat in 8 to 10 years. By then, programming will be a McJob, done mainly by H1-b programmers under slave-labor conditions.
Here's a idea for a chess set along a similar vein. Scroll down to the last entry on the page...
The only important differences between the two major US political parties is which parts of the constitution they choose to ignore.
I'm a US citizen, but my last contract was with an H1b sweatshop, as the token citizen they have to hire to look like they really hire citizens (in a city with over 5000 unemployed programmers at least as qualified as I am, I was one of *3* citizens in a group of over 150 H1b's). I was there on a Friday evening about 5:15, when the supervisor came in and announced that there would be a mandantory staff meeting at 7:00 that evening. This sort of thing was fairly common, because the H1b slaves, er, contractors, knew that if they didn't submit to this sort of arbitrary abuse, they would be on their ways back to their home countries immediately. Most of them routinely put in more than 12 hours/day.
My reply, in front of all the slaves, er, H1b's, was, "If you want me to be present at a staff meeting, you can schedule it during working hours." Then I left, amid several gasps.
The next Monday, I emailed my supervisor, and his supervisor, a excerpt from the employee manual, which outlined the official working hours (8-5, M-F) At that point, I also quit putting in *any* 'casual' overtime (they explicitly refused to pay overtime on my contract).
It took them about 3 more weeks, but I could see they were carefully "documenting" reasons to fire me. After all, I was setting a really bad example for the serfs, er, 'guest' workers. But since I wasn't an H1b, they had to go to a lot more trouble to get rid of me. They started assigning me tasks that could not possibly be completed in normal 40-hour weeks, and then documenting my "lack of performance".
I quit. There are situations that I just find too sickening to tolerate, and this is one of them.
The company is a "well known telecom company" located in Irving, TX.
If you are coming to the US to work with an H1b visa, that's what you have to look forward to. Be sure to line up at least 3 roommates, so that you can afford to get an apartment walking distance from the job, because you won't be making enough money to afford the use of an automobile -- the 'good' salary they quoted you is not going to be quite as good as you expected. And the walk needs to be a short one, because you will be spending 12 to 15 hours/day at the job.
I'm now selling insurance for a living. Programming is going to be a McJob by the end of this decade, thanks in large part to US government policies that encourage the abuse of H1b workers.
Or get the same thing from Texas Domains for $9/yr.
I recall seeing this around 1977 in Byte Magazine. I was on a graphics project for a military contractor at the time, and we submitted this to my supervisor as a joke. He thought it was funny, but *his* boss didn't...
A bandsaw is commonly used to cut meat in butcher shops. I'm guessing that this device would not work on that application.
Also, gotta wonder if this sort of thing might actually *increase* the number of injuries from power cutting equipment -- by reducing the level of respect for the destruction power of the equipment. Sorta like some of the safety features of automobiles has led to some folks driving more agressively...
A cursory reading of the site shows that somebody *really* needs to learn more about effective copywriting. Even if the idea had some merit (it doesn't), the website does a piss poor job of presenting the case. It sure doesn't inspire *me* to want to use the service!
If I were a Venture Capitalist, and somebody came to me looking for VC with something as poorly thought out as this, his ass would hit the middle of the parking lot by at least the second bounce.
The original poster is in the UK. In the UK, there is no right to self defense. There may actually be some provision for self defense somewhere in their law, but from recent news stories out of the UK, anyone who successfully defends himself against an armed criminal in the UK will face stiffer penalties than the criminal.
There are places in the US that have effectively repealed the 2nd amendment. The result has always been an *increase* in violent crime. The two states that have the lowest per capita gun crimes are Vermont and Alaska -- the two states that do not require any permit to carry a concealed handgun.
I personally carry a gun, everywhere that it is legal (and I avoid places where I can't legally carry my gun).
I am a Texas Certified Concealed Handgun License instructor.
No increased hypertension (they checked).
I'm an insurance agent. If you skip your morning coffee before a paramedic exam (typically administered when buying large face amounts of life insurance), your BP reading will be 5-10 points lower than if you don't skip it.
I checked that one personally. I can believe that long-term usage doesn't necessarily increase hypertension, but the short-term effects certainly would make it appear to!
BTW, as I mentioned elsewhere, Science News ran a recent article on coffee, and found some health enhancements -- for decaf.
But there is also evidence that coffee drinkers are less likely to develop serious health conditions, including diabetes and Parkinson's disease.
There was an article in Science News a couple of weeks ago on this. Turns out the folks that get the most health boost from coffee drink decaf.
How you can actually drink Folgers is quite beyond me.
Agreed.
The folks at coffeegeeks use the term "Folgerization" to indicate the process of reduction of quality in small steps, eventually resulting in total crud.
Personally I'll stick to my Dunkin' Donuts fresh ground coffee brewed in a french press (freedom press?).
Funny you should mention Dunkin' Donuts. They are the largest retailer of coffee in the world. *$ is a distant 2nd (IIRC).
Being on a low-carb diet, the coffee is about the only thing that I get at DD. But I go there for coffee because it's better than the burnt stuff at *$ -- when I go to *$, I go to meet somebody, and I don't drink their coffee (they sell enough to other folks that my lack of consumption doesn't seem to bother them a bit). As I mentioned elsewhere, I am in awe of the marketing prowess that made an overpriced small cup of burnt coffee into a status symbol.
It's been my experience here in Seattle (home to Starbucks) that most folks are ordering lattes, caramel machiattos, mochas, etc. than a regular cup o' joe.
At *$, that's largely because it takes a substantial amount of sugar and other additives to mask the aftertaste of improperly roasted (burnt) beans. Once I got used to premium coffees (I have even gone to the trouble of roasting my own), I discovered that drinking it plain could be a real treat.
They also have decaf... and the only times I have ever had *$ coffee, I had decaf. Reckon that's why I never got hooked?
Doubtful. I like premium (properly) fresh-roasted coffee enough that I got into the coffee business myself, but I still drink more decaf than regular.
Note that *$ is not a coffee company. It's a place to go to meet somebody company that happens to sell coffee. I went there just last week to meet somebody. I didn't drink any of their excuse for coffee, but the guy that I met with did.
I am somewhat in awe of the marketing prowess that made a small, overpriced cup of burnt coffee into a status symbol.
I'm guessing that the PC hamster cage was suggested by this news article: Fat Hamster in Printer Sparks Rescue
Apr 1, 7:45 am ET
BERLIN (Reuters) - A hamster called "Teddy" sparked a police rescue mission after he climbed inside a computer printer and got stuck because he was too fat to get out again, authorities said Wednesday. (rest of article can be found on www.iwon.com)
Given the date, I gotta wonder if either is for real.
April Fool to you, too...
I just got back from a walk around the building where I work. Sunny, mild breeze, low 70's (F). Gorgeous day. Too nice to spend all of it sitting in front of a computer screen.
Bye now...
It's not necessarily music, but other draws to the business. They already provide a place to meet & socialize and/or sell, and access the internet. Starbucks is not really even in the *coffee* business; it's just one of the incidental profit centers. Good thing too; they would never make it just on the merits of their coffee; they depend on customers for whom coffee is just an indifferent-tasting warm brown liquid used primarily as a delivery mechanism for caffeine and sugar.