Here's the issue. ebay's P/E ratio is *insane*. Ebay is down from a high of about 120$ to currently around 78$ and their P/E is currently 66 (traditional wisdom says a P/E should be about 10, so a P/E of 66 means their revenues need to grow 6.6x to have a normal P/E). They *needed* those extra fees to bring their P/E down to justify their incredible stock price.
However, ebay is bullshit and everyone knows it. Their fee's were *ALREADY* outrageous. The quality of their listings is rotten, I would only buy something I couldn't get *anywhere* else on ebay. Have a look around, sellers are charging 30$ shipping for small items like mp3 players (30$ will ship 70lbs via UPS). Things get bid up past the price you could get them new at best buy -- most of the time I suspect through shilling. And they really are no deals to be had anymore. Thats the crux of the matter, THERE ARE NO DEALS on ebay anymore. Paying 20$ less then retail and then 30$ for shipping is not a deal.
So, what ebay NEEDED to do was cut their prices to reattract sellers and allow current sellers to list things at lower prices so there are deals again.
What they did was raise their prices because they are greedy and they think they deserve their crazy P/E ratio. And now theyve found out their real value. They've lost almost 130,000 store subscriptions since november. I for one think this was a long time coming.
I bought an XBOX from someone and it was fucked up -- some of the controllers didnt work, the thing was filled with smoke, and they didn't include some of the accessories they said they would.
I left the fucker negative feedback and received this email:
"Hello I wish you had try to contact me right after you had recieve this product before leaving negative feed back. I work with people all the time with them all the time if they cannot pay with in the timely mannor or if any other personal issue come up. You did not try to even contact me before leaving negative feed back. Thank You Tbrisbois@msn.com"
To which I replied: "Do a better job next time and you wont have any issues:)"
To which she replied: "There are other ways of taking care of things you have had the item for how long I am sure we could have worked this out I could of so maybe you should have thought about tha.t I have and I know what to do in the right way for this issue."
If you read between the lines -- shes mad becuase I gave her negative feedback for basically shipping a misleading item. When I leave her bad feedback, she says she has always worked out things with people before. Well WTF? I've sold maybe 10 items on ebay and nobody has ever needed to work out anything with me because I've always been honest. If one of her other customers had the balls to give her bad feedback, I;m sure I wouldn't have bought this item from her.
Nope... I have excellent credit actually... I have several cards with ~10k limits -- and the reason is I never use the credit:) When I got the discover card the interest rate was 6%. They changed it on their own, Im sure they sent a letter or something saying they had done but do you really have time to read every piece of trash that gets delivered in the mail? I only discovered it becuase I had decided to carry a balance and I noticed my finance charges were *outrageous*. I looked everywhere and they basically refuse to tell you the interest rate on statements on their website, but i was able to work backwards from my balance and finance charges.
They also signed me up for some balance protection thing, it was a 1% of your balance per MONTH fee. I never authorized them to do it. Long story short, Discover is a bunch of crooks.
It *REALLY* depends on the company that does your cc's. Discover is HORRIBLE -- they will let anyone do just about anything with your card. Also most places claim they won't ship to an address that isn't your billing address -- curiously thats never been a problem with my discover card. Oh that and the abusive interest rate of like 23% (not kidding, I dont use the card to carry a balance).
That being said, MNBA bank has been very good to me -- I made a large purchase halfway across the country and a fraud representative called 30 minutes later.
Is this another slashvertisement? And whats with the terrible english:
Overall, it's a specification to absolutely kick Shuttle's recently released SB77G5 into touch, the KLOSS better specified in nearly all areas. On-board VGA means KLOSS is useful for those on the PEG16X graphics upgrade path, and it makes it appealing to corporates too (although the facia style negates the GMA900 graphics advantage to that market in some respects as you'll see).
That blows my mind... how can an economy operate under such restrictive conditions?
Can I say things that are opinion like "Burger X is better then burger Y"? Can I say factual things like SATA raid does not handle media errors as efficently as SCSI raid? Could I say something unarguabl true like burger A has 32% less fat then burger B?"
If not, what would possibly be the advantadge to such draconian restrictions? Things over here in the US are strange to granted. I literally see lies on the TV and radio all the time.
Actually, encryption is illegal in france last I heard. There used to be a halarious thing called the "france attack". A ceartin OS offered encrypted filesystems (some versiion of NT)... however, encryption is illegal in france, so setting the OS country to france disabled the encryption mechanism
What I was trying to say though, France is *EXTREMELY* nationalistic -- even more so than the US, and I wouldn't expect them to rule in the US's favor, ever.
About 100 years ago france had a minister of education who was a sociologist, who had some strange theories -- namely that religion was basically worship of your own culture. So he reasoned -- why not actually worship your own culture and skip the church part? And being in the position he was -- he was able to implement this idea. (this is a horribly paraphrased account of what happened)
This is why france acts so strangely --they've literally been taught they are the pinnacle of everything.
With anti-americanism more or less being rampant in france, and the fact that they are messed up to begin with... How could you ever expect a fair rulling from them? France is irrelevant.
Remeber a few years ago they sued yahoo auctions to prevent people from listing nazi memorbilia? They want to sue an american company because they want to forget their complicity?
This is some damn good advice here. Especially since the questions asker alredy specified he has existing rj12. IIRC these these DSL modems are very cheap.
It's common knowledge that the kids are smarter than the teachers, computer-wise
When I was in the 8th grade, I got stuck in both a typing course and "Technology education." The computers were Apple IIe's and 8086's (dated but not REALLY old -- I had a shiny new 286!).
Every friday in typing course we got to play lemonaide stand and whoever got the highest score got a candybar. The highest score ever was like 5000$. The game was written in basic, so I changed the score print line to print score+1000000. We liked to play it cool, so we kept playing the game like normal until some kid walked up behind us, saw the score, them promptly flipped out.
We also got a program that made letters in text mode fall off the screen. It was funny as hell and everyone just assumed the computer had a virus.
I also brought a bunch of games for the tech ed class to play. However, altruism has its price. I wrote a program that displayed some choice words about the teacher, but only once every 50 times the game was loaded. We also put it on most of the schools disks. We had intended it to go off sometime after we were long gone from that class. But we grossly misestimated the ammount of useage the programs got, and two weeks later we were banned from using pretty much anything with electricity:)
When I got to highschool, the library computers were locked down tight, they had a menu program that was pretty secure. So I brought a boot disk, stole the menu program (I had intended to find a security hole in it). Never did find a hole -- but I attached a TSR program TO the menu program, then used a bootdisk to insrt a script which activated the altered menu program after the NEXT reboot (so I would be long gone by the time the payload hit). The TSR I attached made the computer "sing" a song. You have to imagine this was in the days where computers didnt even have SOUND CARDS. And this one was warbling this godawful tune (sampled audio) out its pc speaker.
All the kids in the school knew I did it, but I didn't get offically caught... But I was kicked out of the library for the entire year in another incident altogether which didn't involve a computer:)
I think that a certain amount of "freebies" is part of maintaining a good customer relationship
Ok, well let me walk you through a typical day of mine with freebies:
8:00AM, Melody at so and so wakes me up becuase she cant get her digital camera to work.
12:00PM, Melody calls again because she got her camera to work but how does she get the pictures off it?
1:30PM Bill from so and so calls he just wants a *really* quick change to his application/website/whatever.
3:00PM Lisa from so and so calls because she heard about a new worm on CNN and wants to know if she is vulnerable.
If people don't have to pay for small things, then they bother you with them all the time, and in aggregate, waste a lot of your day.
I am self employed to. This is the best advice there is.
Customers will abuse your good nature to no end if you do freebies.
Example: I do work for this small construction firm. Their payroll is $30,000 a month, they don't want to do any kind of maintenance contract (200 - 500$ a month, nothing). Yet they call me for *every* little thing that goes wrong, mouse runs out of batteries, virus defs out of date, some problem with quickbooks, whatever. I've been meaning to get tough with them....
The corollary to that is actually, if you have the ability, *choose you clients well.* I am stuck with a lot of clients from when I first started out and didn't know any better.
Ive seen a friend of mine whose much more savy "fire" clients for refusing to upgrade off old, vulnerable software. It was great.
An interesting history note about the ruling which created corporate personhood. The judge who issued the ruling actually ruled *against* the concept of corpirate personhood, but big corporations bribed the clerk who recorded the ruling to record the case in their favor.
There used to be a website about it, but I seem to have missplaced the link.
Yep, I have two moded xboxes and have only ever bought 4 games.
One xbox I use to watch digital media, the second is employed as a car OGG player:) Previously I had spent a small fortune on a neo car jukebox, and its a complete piece of trash, so for about half the cost of the car jukebox I got a used xbox, mod chip, and small 3" LCD screen and stuck it in my car:)
Pack mentality. Seriously. American corporations are afraid to deviate from what they think will be accepted by even a little. If you dont believe me, think about the bland *horrible* shit for fast food we cram in our faces every day.
Burger King, Mc Donalds, Carls, Wendys, and 1000 other chains find some slightly different configuration of the SAME food elements, over and over, and over. Meat, bun, lettuce, fries, coke. These guys must come into work every morning and say "jesus h christ how are we gonna get people to buy the same old shit and get excited about it?"
And the answer is their job is easy -- because we as consumers don't demand any creativity. We sit through the same tired special effects extravaganzas at the movies and we are convinced we enjoy it. Disney and Pixar make the same buddy movies over and over and over, and we applaud! Taco Bell crams rice beans and hot sauce into a different sized tortilla and we "run for the border."
So theres your answer my friend, why make something outstanding when good enough is above average? Sony has this HORRIBLE cream and flourescent orange colored electronics line that looks like its right out of The 5th Elements, its god damned ugly but at least they're trying.
I'd prefer bulky and capable of running most apps (see: games) over metrosexually slick any day
You're going to catch a lot of flack for that, but I'm with ya:) People love to complain about gamers being immature. Its sour grapes from Apple fanboys as they hardly have any games -- yet their definition of mature is hauling a powerbook to starbucks, paying a lot of money for terrible coffee, and pretending to work while chatting on IM.
I have a 3.2ghz notebook with a 17" screen, Its wicked fast for the work I need to do (programming), and when I get done I like to play a game of Savage now and then:) Its loud, rude, large, heavy, and I wouldnt have it any other way.
You have no idea how far its gone:) People still using hardware synths are considered dinosaurs in some circles (people have started to rely on software synths as they are cheap and easy to record).
Yes this is terrible. However, McCrappy is really doing us a service, not that they know it. The more rediculous things whith are patented,the more obvious it becomes that the system is broken. IIRC MS patented boolean values a few months ago?
Studies have shown that after the age of about 14 your "plasticity" for new languages drops radically. A new language is stored in physically different locations of your brain when acquired late in life. This is a serious limitation, but it is not impossible to beat. My mother learned spanish in her 30's to get her BCLAD and now speaks it so well that native speakers ask her what part of south america shes from. Its also the reason the american education system is *screwed* as the first time I saw a foreign language I was 15 -- far too late for it to do anything other then frustrate me.
You dont have a full grasp of the problem. Allow me to explain:
The tax system taxes those who *do well* to provide a minimum standard of living for those who don't. At some income level, you become a tax payer as opposed to tax consumer. I don't know what that level is, but Id guess its around 30 - 40k. That is to say -- in aggregate the average person at that income level pays as much taxes as services as they consume, That is public school costs, fire and police service, emergency medical services, welfare, etc. Its not important what that incomne level is -- just assume it exists for a moment?
Now flood the state with 5 million illegal immigrants and the children they have, who live at *far* below that break even point. They stress the system by creating and imbalance in that equation. Have you been to an emergency room in California? In my town it can *easily* be a 48 hour wait to be seen because immigrants are using hospital emergency rooms which are required to see them as primary care -- because they are required by law to treat anyone who comes in the door.
Now heres the *REALLY* fucked up part -- If I goto the hospital -- as a white guy they know I have a pretty good chance of being able to pay them eventually, so they haunt you and ruin your credit and charge you 10x the *actual cost* of the services they provide to subsidize the immigrants that *can't* pay, whom they don't even usually try to collect from.
No, Monoplies *BREAK* the supply/demand curve and are able to set their prices arbitrarily (usually high, but sometimes low -- take "dumping" for instance, selling a prouct at a loss for market share (read:ie vs nutscrape).
Slashdot Mirror
However, ebay is bullshit and everyone knows it. Their fee's were *ALREADY* outrageous. The quality of their listings is rotten, I would only buy something I couldn't get *anywhere* else on ebay. Have a look around, sellers are charging 30$ shipping for small items like mp3 players (30$ will ship 70lbs via UPS). Things get bid up past the price you could get them new at best buy -- most of the time I suspect through shilling. And they really are no deals to be had anymore. Thats the crux of the matter, THERE ARE NO DEALS on ebay anymore. Paying 20$ less then retail and then 30$ for shipping is not a deal.
So, what ebay NEEDED to do was cut their prices to reattract sellers and allow current sellers to list things at lower prices so there are deals again.
What they did was raise their prices because they are greedy and they think they deserve their crazy P/E ratio. And now theyve found out their real value. They've lost almost 130,000 store subscriptions since november. I for one think this was a long time coming.
I bought an XBOX from someone and it was fucked up -- some of the controllers didnt work, the thing was filled with smoke, and they didn't include some of the accessories they said they would.
I left the fucker negative feedback and received this email:
"Hello I wish you had try to contact me right after you had recieve this product before leaving negative feed back. I work with people all the time with them all the time if they cannot pay with in the timely mannor or if any other personal issue come up. You did not try to even contact me before leaving negative feed back. Thank You Tbrisbois@msn.com"
To which I replied: "Do a better job next time and you wont have any issues :)"
To which she replied: "There are other ways of taking care of things you have had the item for how long I am sure we could have worked this out I could of so maybe you should have thought about tha.t I have and I know what to do in the right way for this issue."
If you read between the lines -- shes mad becuase I gave her negative feedback for basically shipping a misleading item. When I leave her bad feedback, she says she has always worked out things with people before. Well WTF? I've sold maybe 10 items on ebay and nobody has ever needed to work out anything with me because I've always been honest. If one of her other customers had the balls to give her bad feedback, I;m sure I wouldn't have bought this item from her.
They also signed me up for some balance protection thing, it was a 1% of your balance per MONTH fee. I never authorized them to do it. Long story short, Discover is a bunch of crooks.
That being said, MNBA bank has been very good to me -- I made a large purchase halfway across the country and a fraud representative called 30 minutes later.
Overall, it's a specification to absolutely kick Shuttle's recently released SB77G5 into touch, the KLOSS better specified in nearly all areas. On-board VGA means KLOSS is useful for those on the PEG16X graphics upgrade path, and it makes it appealing to corporates too (although the facia style negates the GMA900 graphics advantage to that market in some respects as you'll see).
Can I say things that are opinion like "Burger X is better then burger Y"? Can I say factual things like SATA raid does not handle media errors as efficently as SCSI raid? Could I say something unarguabl true like burger A has 32% less fat then burger B?"
If not, what would possibly be the advantadge to such draconian restrictions? Things over here in the US are strange to granted. I literally see lies on the TV and radio all the time.
Actually, encryption is illegal in france last I heard. There used to be a halarious thing called the "france attack". A ceartin OS offered encrypted filesystems (some versiion of NT)... however, encryption is illegal in france, so setting the OS country to france disabled the encryption mechanism
What I was trying to say though, France is *EXTREMELY* nationalistic -- even more so than the US, and I wouldn't expect them to rule in the US's favor, ever.
About 100 years ago france had a minister of education who was a sociologist, who had some strange theories -- namely that religion was basically worship of your own culture. So he reasoned -- why not actually worship your own culture and skip the church part? And being in the position he was -- he was able to implement this idea. (this is a horribly paraphrased account of what happened)
This is why france acts so strangely --they've literally been taught they are the pinnacle of everything.
Remeber a few years ago they sued yahoo auctions to prevent people from listing nazi memorbilia? They want to sue an american company because they want to forget their complicity?
This is some damn good advice here. Especially since the questions asker alredy specified he has existing rj12. IIRC these these DSL modems are very cheap.
When I was in the 8th grade, I got stuck in both a typing course and "Technology education." The computers were Apple IIe's and 8086's (dated but not REALLY old -- I had a shiny new 286!).
Every friday in typing course we got to play lemonaide stand and whoever got the highest score got a candybar. The highest score ever was like 5000$. The game was written in basic, so I changed the score print line to print score+1000000. We liked to play it cool, so we kept playing the game like normal until some kid walked up behind us, saw the score, them promptly flipped out.
We also got a program that made letters in text mode fall off the screen. It was funny as hell and everyone just assumed the computer had a virus.
I also brought a bunch of games for the tech ed class to play. However, altruism has its price. I wrote a program that displayed some choice words about the teacher, but only once every 50 times the game was loaded. We also put it on most of the schools disks. We had intended it to go off sometime after we were long gone from that class. But we grossly misestimated the ammount of useage the programs got, and two weeks later we were banned from using pretty much anything with electricity :)
When I got to highschool, the library computers were locked down tight, they had a menu program that was pretty secure. So I brought a boot disk, stole the menu program (I had intended to find a security hole in it). Never did find a hole -- but I attached a TSR program TO the menu program, then used a bootdisk to insrt a script which activated the altered menu program after the NEXT reboot (so I would be long gone by the time the payload hit). The TSR I attached made the computer "sing" a song. You have to imagine this was in the days where computers didnt even have SOUND CARDS. And this one was warbling this godawful tune (sampled audio) out its pc speaker.
All the kids in the school knew I did it, but I didn't get offically caught... But I was kicked out of the library for the entire year in another incident altogether which didn't involve a computer :)
That being said, I'll take any 12ax7's he might have :)
Was I alone in thinking the TNG finale was one of if not the best episodes of the series?
Ok, well let me walk you through a typical day of mine with freebies:
8:00AM, Melody at so and so wakes me up becuase she cant get her digital camera to work.
12:00PM, Melody calls again because she got her camera to work but how does she get the pictures off it?
1:30PM Bill from so and so calls he just wants a *really* quick change to his application/website/whatever.
3:00PM Lisa from so and so calls because she heard about a new worm on CNN and wants to know if she is vulnerable.
If people don't have to pay for small things, then they bother you with them all the time, and in aggregate, waste a lot of your day.
Customers will abuse your good nature to no end if you do freebies.
Example: I do work for this small construction firm. Their payroll is $30,000 a month, they don't want to do any kind of maintenance contract (200 - 500$ a month, nothing). Yet they call me for *every* little thing that goes wrong, mouse runs out of batteries, virus defs out of date, some problem with quickbooks, whatever. I've been meaning to get tough with them....
The corollary to that is actually, if you have the ability, *choose you clients well.* I am stuck with a lot of clients from when I first started out and didn't know any better.
Ive seen a friend of mine whose much more savy "fire" clients for refusing to upgrade off old, vulnerable software. It was great.
There used to be a website about it, but I seem to have missplaced the link.
One xbox I use to watch digital media, the second is employed as a car OGG player :) Previously I had spent a small fortune on a neo car jukebox, and its a complete piece of trash, so for about half the cost of the car jukebox I got a used xbox, mod chip, and small 3" LCD screen and stuck it in my car :)
Burger King, Mc Donalds, Carls, Wendys, and 1000 other chains find some slightly different configuration of the SAME food elements, over and over, and over. Meat, bun, lettuce, fries, coke. These guys must come into work every morning and say "jesus h christ how are we gonna get people to buy the same old shit and get excited about it?"
And the answer is their job is easy -- because we as consumers don't demand any creativity. We sit through the same tired special effects extravaganzas at the movies and we are convinced we enjoy it. Disney and Pixar make the same buddy movies over and over and over, and we applaud! Taco Bell crams rice beans and hot sauce into a different sized tortilla and we "run for the border."
So theres your answer my friend, why make something outstanding when good enough is above average? Sony has this HORRIBLE cream and flourescent orange colored electronics line that looks like its right out of The 5th Elements, its god damned ugly but at least they're trying.
You're going to catch a lot of flack for that, but I'm with ya :) People love to complain about gamers being immature. Its sour grapes from Apple fanboys as they hardly have any games -- yet their definition of mature is hauling a powerbook to starbucks, paying a lot of money for terrible coffee, and pretending to work while chatting on IM.
I have a 3.2ghz notebook with a 17" screen, Its wicked fast for the work I need to do (programming), and when I get done I like to play a game of Savage now and then :) Its loud, rude, large, heavy, and I wouldnt have it any other way.
You have no idea how far its gone :) People still using hardware synths are considered dinosaurs in some circles (people have started to rely on software synths as they are cheap and easy to record).
Yes this is terrible. However, McCrappy is really doing us a service, not that they know it. The more rediculous things whith are patented,the more obvious it becomes that the system is broken. IIRC MS patented boolean values a few months ago?
Studies have shown that after the age of about 14 your "plasticity" for new languages drops radically. A new language is stored in physically different locations of your brain when acquired late in life. This is a serious limitation, but it is not impossible to beat. My mother learned spanish in her 30's to get her BCLAD and now speaks it so well that native speakers ask her what part of south america shes from. Its also the reason the american education system is *screwed* as the first time I saw a foreign language I was 15 -- far too late for it to do anything other then frustrate me.
The tax system taxes those who *do well* to provide a minimum standard of living for those who don't. At some income level, you become a tax payer as opposed to tax consumer. I don't know what that level is, but Id guess its around 30 - 40k. That is to say -- in aggregate the average person at that income level pays as much taxes as services as they consume, That is public school costs, fire and police service, emergency medical services, welfare, etc. Its not important what that incomne level is -- just assume it exists for a moment?
Now flood the state with 5 million illegal immigrants and the children they have, who live at *far* below that break even point. They stress the system by creating and imbalance in that equation. Have you been to an emergency room in California? In my town it can *easily* be a 48 hour wait to be seen because immigrants are using hospital emergency rooms which are required to see them as primary care -- because they are required by law to treat anyone who comes in the door.
Now heres the *REALLY* fucked up part -- If I goto the hospital -- as a white guy they know I have a pretty good chance of being able to pay them eventually, so they haunt you and ruin your credit and charge you 10x the *actual cost* of the services they provide to subsidize the immigrants that *can't* pay, whom they don't even usually try to collect from.
So that as they say, is the sticky wicket :)
What if, the same people making money off them were using that money to bribe state and federal officals in charge of the whole mess?
No, Monoplies *BREAK* the supply/demand curve and are able to set their prices arbitrarily (usually high, but sometimes low -- take "dumping" for instance, selling a prouct at a loss for market share (read:ie vs nutscrape).