This fact about car buying is one reason Saturn and some other dealers have adopted a fixed-price business model (these dealers can still haggle you for trade-ins and financing, though). Just make sure you are informed, objective, and cynical, and the odds will be pretty good that you'll come out of it okay. Good luck.
I was wondering if you could describe to us in detail the tactics he used and what you did to combat them.
Buying a car is not trivial, and I'm glad that I've only had to do it twice so far and won't have to do it again for another ten years, if I can help it.
1) Educate yourself. Narrow down your choices to one or two cars that fit your needs and lifestyle really well and are in the ballpark of what you can afford. Then, go to websites like edmunds.com, kbb.com, Yahoo! Autos, Consumer Reports, etc. to figure out the range of invoice prices, find out what kickbacks the dealer might get, figure out the pricing on optional equipment, read user reviews, and research reliability histories.
Also, firmly understand what the cost of financing is (the interest over the lifetime of the loan). Figure out monthly payments, understanding that longer loans and higher interest rates cost you more money. It is probably best to aim for the shortest loan you can comfortably afford month-to-month. Make a budget of your monthly expenses when doing this. If you are finding that your preferred car is stretching into five or more years to pay it off, you should probably find a cheaper car.
Learn the terminology behind loans and leases and why leases are tricky. Leases can have milage penalties, baloon payments, etc. that can kick you in the rear if you didn't anticipate them. Also, the marketing behind leases can be very decieving. If you find yourself leaning towards a lease, make sure you read the fine print.
2) Decide if this car is really all it seems to be. This is also a good time for a test drive. If you have any uncertainty, go back to step 1. If you are not _convinced_ that the car is what you want and if you are not educated about it, the salesman will walk all over you. They have an eagle eye for insecurities in their potential customers, and they will exploit them fully.
3) Don't let anything the salesman says influence your thinking about the car. They will insult the competition, they will insult your intelligence, and they will try to make you feel really bad about considering anything other than the cars on their lot. Do not get emotional about the car. You most definitely do not have to buy that particular car, and there are always other cars and other dealers you can fall back on. Always remember that the salesman is trying to manipulate and confuse you. The salesman is not your friend.
4) If you finally get to the point of telling the salesman, "I'd like to talk to you about buying this car," be forewarned that you will see bizarre mathematical wizardry unfold before you. None of the numbers the salesmen will use will make any sense, they won't add up to anything meaningful, and the words used to describe them are there only to mislead you. Take a calculator with you. Take your notes from step 1. Take a pencil and scratch paper. Understand fully beforehand the amount that you plan to finance with the bank, because this one number is the only concrete number the salesman can't lie to you about. If you aren't completely satisfied with how the negotiation is proceeding, then _do_not_go_any_further_. You still have not bought the car and are under no obligation. Walk out if you have to. If the salesman has to check with his manager more than once as you are approaching your target price, you are probably getting close to the end of the negotiation.
5) Once you have agreed to the pricing, then all that remains is paperwork for the title, registration, and financing. This part is tedious but not difficult. Just be aware of what you are signing and beware extra costs that the dealer tries to sneak in at this point. Also beware their extended warranty and maintenence plans. These plans are expensive and their only value is convienience to you. They are not necessarily cost effective, especially if you can do your own maintainence.
Buying a car is certainly not the worst thing in the world, but it can be stressful. This f
You should browse the MIT, Georgia Tech, Urbana Super Computing Center, CMU, SDSU (bioinformatics & clustering), the NIH, etc. There's still quite a bit goin on.
So, after every student in the country has finished their Java webcam, will that be the end?
Well the dealership doesn't need to see squat, and they shouldn't unless they are lending you money or doing the loan shopping for you.
Given that practically no local bank can beat dealer financing backed by the super-mega-biggie banks, any more, I would guess that it is very common for dealers to see most customers' credit reports.
I believe they see a "full blown credit report".
Makes me glad I negotiated the prices before doing the financing.
Airlines are probably the most dramatic example most people would be familiar with. It isn't unheard of for one person to pay $100 and the next person to pay $1000 for, essentially, the same seat on the same flight.
I understand that credit scores reduce the default rate for loans, but it is hard to tell what the dealership sees. Do you know whether the dealership gets just the score as a raw number, or do they get the full-blown credit report with all my credit cards, loans, bill payment history, etc.? I'd rather they not see the latter, regardless of my credit score.
I recall buying my last car, where the salesman had to try several tactics in succession before realizing I wasn't the typical dumbass.
The tactics he tried were set up to catch people of decreasing stupidity, but, because he didn't know who I was, he had no choice but to make guesses about my intelligence and willingness to spend money. This means I was slightly empowered as a consumer, and the deck wasn't entirely stacked in the dealer's favor.
Now, imagine if the salesman had access to my entire purchasing history. If you think salespeople are agressive now, I don't want to imagine what it will be like if they use our own experience against us! The credit score is already bad enough as it is.
MS stability isn't all that far from Linux stability.
I've seen Linux crash only once. I've used it for years. I've seen Solaris crash only twice. I've been using Solaris longer than Linux.
At work, performing the Windows Update required three or four reboots. Solaris requires a reboot only if the kernel was patched, and that's only on low-end systems that don't have live upgrades. Solaris recommends one reboot per patch cluster, just to be safe (one patch cluster contains all current recommended patches).
I've had Microsoft Word hang Windows 2000 so hard, sometimes, that a hard power reset was the only recourse. I've seen my co-workers not be able to use their e-mail because the Exhange server went down (thankfully, I've been liberated from Exchange). I've seen the "Administrator" user not able to do basic things like kill processes. I've seen dozens of corporate e-mails about Windows viruses, worms, and vulnerabilities. I see the blocked packets for Microsoft-specific ports on my firewall logs.
In Linux and Solaris, the worst I've seen an application do is cause the X server to restart affecting only me and no one else on the system.
Microsoft has some real big problems to overcome regarding compartmentalization in their systems. Unfortunately, actually properly architecting a system goes against their business ethic of locking-in and crushing the hopes of their customers. Conversely, does Red Hat or Sun care if alternate X servers or window managers are installed? Nope. They might gripe about the warranty, but they don't stop you from doing it.
Imagine the incovenience of reaching out and pressing a button replaced with patting all your pockets down searching for a phone, pulling it out, typing in your pin code to unlock it and....still pressing a button.
Yet, I'm sure thousands of Microsoft Certified Elevator Administrator job postings have just appeared on Monster.com. Sometimes, I think Microsoft's real goal is to have everyone on the planet work for the Microsoft Corporation, directly or indirectly. With everyone using Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Money, Microsoft Visio, Microsoft SQL Server, and so forth, everyone is either an employee of Microsoft Corporation, a Microsoft user, or a Microsoft systems administrator.
Think about it, nearly everyone on the planet who uses a computer has Microsoft in their resume or CV. Nearly everyone. Why doesn't that make more people worried?!? I've touched Windows XP only once and haven't given Microsoft any of my money in over five years...does that make me a rebel in the eyes of our corporate overlords? Will I be put on some sort of watch list for later capture and forced assimilation?
Let's hope my last glimmer of faith in the free-market will reset Microsoft down to where they should be--aside other corporations rather than sitting on them.
There are people out there - believe it or not - that think $199 is a good deal on an operating system.
$199 is not a good deal for Windows. I, however, paid about $200 for Solaris 9 (media + RTU license for used workstation), and got a truly enterprise-class OS with no artificial limits (honest people would pay for extra CPU RTUs, though), no DRM, bundled StarOffice, bundled application servers and web servers, single-user Oracle 9i, a whole CD of GNU tools, and demos of BEA WebLogic and the Sun compiler suite. Solaris 9 also came fully documented.
I believe Mac OS X goes for a similar amount of money and is also better than Windows.
I've done side-by-side benchmarks of single-cpu Sun boxes vs. dual-cpu Dell boxes running Linux and the Sun boxes won every time.
I'm a Sun fan, but I am also skeptical of your claim. For very small and CPU-intensive applications, the Dell boxes might win. Any program that taxes I/O should probably do better on the Suns, however (just keep slapping in more PCI SCSI or network controllers into the Suns). Any highly-parallelizable program would probably do better on Suns in SMP mode (if you can afford 106 CPUs, that is).
For modest workstation loads, I think the coming Sun Blade 1500 and Sun Blade 2500 won't quite catch up to the Power Mac G5 and the AMD Opteron systems. Regardless, I think I would still buy the Sun over a Dell but would take a hard look at the G5 (Sun and Apple do things Dell and Microsoft can only dream of: work as I expect them to and work consistently).
What if it's just the stuff we want to keep, like source code, and not all of Joe Schmoe's crap? Way fewer pages.
Who gets to determine what is and is not historically significant? Granted, the fact that Windows installs are highly redundant is one thing, but what about programmatically-generated data files?
Conserving data is not as easy as it seems. I wonder whether it'd be more efficient to print out the source codes on acid-free paper and store them like books - or perhaps microfiches - in a number of locations around the world.
This is potentially just the data on Joe Schmoes Best Buy laptop. Now consider that the amount of data generated by humans is something like terabytes per day...
The problem came when they wanted to get the data off.. and couldn't easily find a compatible lazerdisc reader.
The archeologists, if they are worth anything, would have examined the disk under a microscope and noticed many binary pits. Noting that the disk can be spun, it might occur to them that the bits are actually in a spiral or in concentric tracks that can be read using a custom-built laser transducer. If they get that far, they now have a long stream of billions of bits, so the format of those bits is suddenly very significant. If those bits came off of a Microsoft Joliet-encoded CD-ROM containing Microsoft Word files further encoded in a Microsoft Palladium DRM scheme, then my bet is that the archeologists are SOL.
However, if those bits came off a standard ISO CD-ROM and contained ASCII, or even XML-based, files, the odds are basically infinitely better that the archeologists can pubilsh something interesting about their find.
Even looking only a few years into the future, this is why it is critically important that people stop putting their faith in companies like Microsoft. People should be able to access their own data using ubiquitous standard technology rather than crippled proprietary techology that is common only due to mass foolishness.
We are talking here about file formats 30 years old, or even less. Try to imagine what will happen in 200 years. Most of our history will be written to electronic media, and for people that will live in 200 years, the file format used for that media will very probably be undecipherable.
This is why companies like Microsoft are Public Enemy #1. They fooled millions of people to record their research, correspondence, and documentation in their proprietary formats. There will be billions of people-hours worth of history lost when the last installation of Microsoft Office in the world gets corrupted and, unfortunately, the last install media was broken during the museum's world-tour of 20th century computing technology.
Have you ever tried to explain "source" to a politician? I have. Let me tell you. Just getting them over that hurdle is tough enough.
I wonder if they would be receptive to an analogy comparing contracts to programs. Contracts can be every bit as complex as a modest computer program, complete with variables (Microsoft will be referred to as the National Consumer Screwers Union or, simply, Union below...) and complex state and rules (ye shall profide the Union with 88% profit margins, and ye forfeit all rights and control over your personal data and computer equipment to the Union...).
If you write P2P software you will know that NAT is a major pain in the ass and requires very bizarre architectures involving reflectors owned and run by third parties (or at least port forwarding).
However, NAT is extremely easy from the end-user's point of view. Configuring dial-up PPP and getting DNS working are much much harder.
On OpenBSD, at least, getting basic NAT is literally one or two lines in a configuration file. There are even good examples to follow. In setting up my dedicated OpenBSD firewall/router/NAT/dial-up box, NAT was by far the least of my worries (not that firewalling or routing are difficult, either...CHAT scripts, however, are $%#$%@#!).
Slashdot Mirror
Got cut off there...
This fact about car buying is one reason Saturn and some other dealers have adopted a fixed-price business model (these dealers can still haggle you for trade-ins and financing, though). Just make sure you are informed, objective, and cynical, and the odds will be pretty good that you'll come out of it okay. Good luck.
I was wondering if you could describe to us in detail the tactics he used and what you did to combat them.
Buying a car is not trivial, and I'm glad that I've only had to do it twice so far and won't have to do it again for another ten years, if I can help it.
1) Educate yourself. Narrow down your choices to one or two cars that fit your needs and lifestyle really well and are in the ballpark of what you can afford. Then, go to websites like edmunds.com, kbb.com, Yahoo! Autos, Consumer Reports, etc. to figure out the range of invoice prices, find out what kickbacks the dealer might get, figure out the pricing on optional equipment, read user reviews, and research reliability histories.
Also, firmly understand what the cost of financing is (the interest over the lifetime of the loan). Figure out monthly payments, understanding that longer loans and higher interest rates cost you more money. It is probably best to aim for the shortest loan you can comfortably afford month-to-month. Make a budget of your monthly expenses when doing this. If you are finding that your preferred car is stretching into five or more years to pay it off, you should probably find a cheaper car.
Learn the terminology behind loans and leases and why leases are tricky. Leases can have milage penalties, baloon payments, etc. that can kick you in the rear if you didn't anticipate them. Also, the marketing behind leases can be very decieving. If you find yourself leaning towards a lease, make sure you read the fine print.
2) Decide if this car is really all it seems to be. This is also a good time for a test drive. If you have any uncertainty, go back to step 1. If you are not _convinced_ that the car is what you want and if you are not educated about it, the salesman will walk all over you. They have an eagle eye for insecurities in their potential customers, and they will exploit them fully.
3) Don't let anything the salesman says influence your thinking about the car. They will insult the competition, they will insult your intelligence, and they will try to make you feel really bad about considering anything other than the cars on their lot. Do not get emotional about the car. You most definitely do not have to buy that particular car, and there are always other cars and other dealers you can fall back on. Always remember that the salesman is trying to manipulate and confuse you. The salesman is not your friend.
4) If you finally get to the point of telling the salesman, "I'd like to talk to you about buying this car," be forewarned that you will see bizarre mathematical wizardry unfold before you. None of the numbers the salesmen will use will make any sense, they won't add up to anything meaningful, and the words used to describe them are there only to mislead you. Take a calculator with you. Take your notes from step 1. Take a pencil and scratch paper. Understand fully beforehand the amount that you plan to finance with the bank, because this one number is the only concrete number the salesman can't lie to you about. If you aren't completely satisfied with how the negotiation is proceeding, then _do_not_go_any_further_. You still have not bought the car and are under no obligation. Walk out if you have to. If the salesman has to check with his manager more than once as you are approaching your target price, you are probably getting close to the end of the negotiation.
5) Once you have agreed to the pricing, then all that remains is paperwork for the title, registration, and financing. This part is tedious but not difficult. Just be aware of what you are signing and beware extra costs that the dealer tries to sneak in at this point. Also beware their extended warranty and maintenence plans. These plans are expensive and their only value is convienience to you. They are not necessarily cost effective, especially if you can do your own maintainence.
Buying a car is certainly not the worst thing in the world, but it can be stressful. This f
You should browse the MIT, Georgia Tech, Urbana Super Computing Center, CMU, SDSU (bioinformatics & clustering), the NIH, etc. There's still quite a bit goin on.
So, after every student in the country has finished their Java webcam, will that be the end?
Next thing you know they'll be designing beer mugs that tell you when they're empty.
If a person sobers up enough to realize that their mug is empty, then it is clearly time for them to get more beer. It is that simple.
Well the dealership doesn't need to see squat, and they shouldn't unless they are lending you money or doing the loan shopping for you.
Given that practically no local bank can beat dealer financing backed by the super-mega-biggie banks, any more, I would guess that it is very common for dealers to see most customers' credit reports.
I believe they see a "full blown credit report".
Makes me glad I negotiated the prices before doing the financing.
Same thing for airline seats...
Airlines are probably the most dramatic example most people would be familiar with. It isn't unheard of for one person to pay $100 and the next person to pay $1000 for, essentially, the same seat on the same flight.
Credit scores are a good thing.
I understand that credit scores reduce the default rate for loans, but it is hard to tell what the dealership sees. Do you know whether the dealership gets just the score as a raw number, or do they get the full-blown credit report with all my credit cards, loans, bill payment history, etc.? I'd rather they not see the latter, regardless of my credit score.
I recall buying my last car, where the salesman had to try several tactics in succession before realizing I wasn't the typical dumbass.
The tactics he tried were set up to catch people of decreasing stupidity, but, because he didn't know who I was, he had no choice but to make guesses about my intelligence and willingness to spend money. This means I was slightly empowered as a consumer, and the deck wasn't entirely stacked in the dealer's favor.
Now, imagine if the salesman had access to my entire purchasing history. If you think salespeople are agressive now, I don't want to imagine what it will be like if they use our own experience against us! The credit score is already bad enough as it is.
MS stability isn't all that far from Linux stability.
I've seen Linux crash only once. I've used it for years. I've seen Solaris crash only twice. I've been using Solaris longer than Linux.
At work, performing the Windows Update required three or four reboots. Solaris requires a reboot only if the kernel was patched, and that's only on low-end systems that don't have live upgrades. Solaris recommends one reboot per patch cluster, just to be safe (one patch cluster contains all current recommended patches).
I've had Microsoft Word hang Windows 2000 so hard, sometimes, that a hard power reset was the only recourse. I've seen my co-workers not be able to use their e-mail because the Exhange server went down (thankfully, I've been liberated from Exchange). I've seen the "Administrator" user not able to do basic things like kill processes. I've seen dozens of corporate e-mails about Windows viruses, worms, and vulnerabilities. I see the blocked packets for Microsoft-specific ports on my firewall logs.
In Linux and Solaris, the worst I've seen an application do is cause the X server to restart affecting only me and no one else on the system.
Microsoft has some real big problems to overcome regarding compartmentalization in their systems. Unfortunately, actually properly architecting a system goes against their business ethic of locking-in and crushing the hopes of their customers. Conversely, does Red Hat or Sun care if alternate X servers or window managers are installed? Nope. They might gripe about the warranty, but they don't stop you from doing it.
Microsoft sucks.
Imagine the incovenience of reaching out and pressing a button replaced with patting all your pockets down searching for a phone, pulling it out, typing in your pin code to unlock it and....still pressing a button.
Yet, I'm sure thousands of Microsoft Certified Elevator Administrator job postings have just appeared on Monster.com. Sometimes, I think Microsoft's real goal is to have everyone on the planet work for the Microsoft Corporation, directly or indirectly. With everyone using Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Money, Microsoft Visio, Microsoft SQL Server, and so forth, everyone is either an employee of Microsoft Corporation, a Microsoft user, or a Microsoft systems administrator.
Think about it, nearly everyone on the planet who uses a computer has Microsoft in their resume or CV. Nearly everyone. Why doesn't that make more people worried?!? I've touched Windows XP only once and haven't given Microsoft any of my money in over five years...does that make me a rebel in the eyes of our corporate overlords? Will I be put on some sort of watch list for later capture and forced assimilation?
Let's hope my last glimmer of faith in the free-market will reset Microsoft down to where they should be--aside other corporations rather than sitting on them.
It's MS Intern!
One of these would have been a savior during the 1996-2000 presidency!
There are people out there - believe it or not - that think $199 is a good deal on an operating system.
$199 is not a good deal for Windows. I, however, paid about $200 for Solaris 9 (media + RTU license for used workstation), and got a truly enterprise-class OS with no artificial limits (honest people would pay for extra CPU RTUs, though), no DRM, bundled StarOffice, bundled application servers and web servers, single-user Oracle 9i, a whole CD of GNU tools, and demos of BEA WebLogic and the Sun compiler suite. Solaris 9 also came fully documented.
I believe Mac OS X goes for a similar amount of money and is also better than Windows.
I'm the Christian the devil warned you about
The gay one that smokes crack and lies to the IRS?
I've done side-by-side benchmarks of single-cpu Sun boxes vs. dual-cpu Dell boxes running Linux and the Sun boxes won every time.
I'm a Sun fan, but I am also skeptical of your claim. For very small and CPU-intensive applications, the Dell boxes might win. Any program that taxes I/O should probably do better on the Suns, however (just keep slapping in more PCI SCSI or network controllers into the Suns). Any highly-parallelizable program would probably do better on Suns in SMP mode (if you can afford 106 CPUs, that is).
For modest workstation loads, I think the coming Sun Blade 1500 and Sun Blade 2500 won't quite catch up to the Power Mac G5 and the AMD Opteron systems. Regardless, I think I would still buy the Sun over a Dell but would take a hard look at the G5 (Sun and Apple do things Dell and Microsoft can only dream of: work as I expect them to and work consistently).
What if it's just the stuff we want to keep, like source code, and not all of Joe Schmoe's crap? Way fewer pages.
Who gets to determine what is and is not historically significant? Granted, the fact that Windows installs are highly redundant is one thing, but what about programmatically-generated data files?
I greatly regret the loss of PAM
PAM?
Conserving data is not as easy as it seems. I wonder whether it'd be more efficient to print out the source codes on acid-free paper and store them like books - or perhaps microfiches - in a number of locations around the world.
One modern 80GB hard disk.
80GB = 80,000,000,000 bytes = 80,000,000,000 ASCII characters.
One stanarded printed US-letter-sized page is 80 X 60 characters or 4800 characters.
80,000,000,000 characters / (4800 characters/page) = 16,666,667 pages (rounded off).
This is potentially just the data on Joe Schmoes Best Buy laptop. Now consider that the amount of data generated by humans is something like terabytes per day...
The problem came when they wanted to get the data off .. and couldn't easily find a compatible lazerdisc reader.
The archeologists, if they are worth anything, would have examined the disk under a microscope and noticed many binary pits. Noting that the disk can be spun, it might occur to them that the bits are actually in a spiral or in concentric tracks that can be read using a custom-built laser transducer. If they get that far, they now have a long stream of billions of bits, so the format of those bits is suddenly very significant. If those bits came off of a Microsoft Joliet-encoded CD-ROM containing Microsoft Word files further encoded in a Microsoft Palladium DRM scheme, then my bet is that the archeologists are SOL.
However, if those bits came off a standard ISO CD-ROM and contained ASCII, or even XML-based, files, the odds are basically infinitely better that the archeologists can pubilsh something interesting about their find.
Even looking only a few years into the future, this is why it is critically important that people stop putting their faith in companies like Microsoft. People should be able to access their own data using ubiquitous standard technology rather than crippled proprietary techology that is common only due to mass foolishness.
The ancients were much more clever than we typically give credit.
Given the near-100% chance that there were many ancient "Einsteins", the pyramids are probably just a glimpse of what they could do.
We are talking here about file formats 30 years old, or even less. Try to imagine what will happen in 200 years. Most of our history will be written to electronic media, and for people that will live in 200 years, the file format used for that media will very probably be undecipherable.
This is why companies like Microsoft are Public Enemy #1. They fooled millions of people to record their research, correspondence, and documentation in their proprietary formats. There will be billions of people-hours worth of history lost when the last installation of Microsoft Office in the world gets corrupted and, unfortunately, the last install media was broken during the museum's world-tour of 20th century computing technology.
Have you ever tried to explain "source" to a politician? I have. Let me tell you. Just getting them over that hurdle is tough enough.
I wonder if they would be receptive to an analogy comparing contracts to programs. Contracts can be every bit as complex as a modest computer program, complete with variables (Microsoft will be referred to as the National Consumer Screwers Union or, simply, Union below...) and complex state and rules (ye shall profide the Union with 88% profit margins, and ye forfeit all rights and control over your personal data and computer equipment to the Union...).
Can't exactly put that in a wireless mouse, now, can we?
Slashdot readers typically have very strong wrists (a curious side-effect of strenuous web-browsing), so it shouldn't be a problem.
... think of the implications of a whole town populated with /. readers!
It'll last one generation, because everyone tried to reproduce...but missed.
If you write P2P software you will know that NAT is a major pain in the ass and requires very bizarre architectures involving reflectors owned and run by third parties (or at least port forwarding).
However, NAT is extremely easy from the end-user's point of view. Configuring dial-up PPP and getting DNS working are much much harder.
On OpenBSD, at least, getting basic NAT is literally one or two lines in a configuration file. There are even good examples to follow. In setting up my dedicated OpenBSD firewall/router/NAT/dial-up box, NAT was by far the least of my worries (not that firewalling or routing are difficult, either...CHAT scripts, however, are $%#$%@#!).
will be branded assholes.
Think you are being polite wearing earphones in a computer lab or library? Think no one can hear you? You are wrong!!!
Only those full-size aircraft-or-studio-style headsets can attenuate the sound enough for other people to be oblivious to the crap-rap within.