Though my company is not Apple authorized, I can shed some light on their pricing model. There's are reseller costs for the various iPods as of today. While our account isn't Best Buy or CompUSA in size, we get decent pricing for our quantity levels, so these should be accurate to within a few dollars.
IPOD 10G FOR MAC & PC PERSONALIZED - $296.49
IPOD 20GB (PERSONALIZED) - $404.09
IPOD 30G FOR MAC & PC WITH DOCK WIRED REMOTE/CASE PERSONALIZED - $481.40
IPOD 40GB 10K SONGS FIREWALL EARPHONES ADPTR IPOD DOCK - $461.21
There's also absolutely zero units available on any of these with ETA from Apple looking like early 2004.
The demand for these is so high that while there's not a ton of margin on them, there's also no need to mark them down to sell them.
Tad Williams was mentioned here, but only briefly. I'll try and give a bit more detailed synopsys of 2 series of his that I've read. First is the Otherland series. Without giving too much detail, it's a 4 volume story about virtual reality gone very wrong. This isn't really some hokey "techno" novel, but one that portrays a story of something that might be possible in a few decades. Not only is the story intriguing and one of the best Sci-Fi books I've ever read, Tad Williams is a master at visualization and conveying his images into text. If you've read this series you'll know exactly what I mean - your head just fills up with mental images as you're reading this series of these fantastic (simulated) worlds.
Someone else mentioned the Memory, Sorrow & Thorn books. I'm actually on book 3 of these now and it is excellent Fantasy (way way way better than Weiss & Hickman).
Peter Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction series is drop dead amazing. I randomly picked up the first book in Heathrow for a flight back home - I still consider myself very lucky for stumbling on this fantastic series. It's true Sci-Fi in the best of the genre - space ships, battles, strange planets, alien philosophies - and of course the undead. Good enough that I will eventually go back and read it again - and it's a LONG series, but worth every page.
I'll also mention George R. R. Martin and his Fantasy series 'A Song of Fire and Ice'. Again, an excellent Fantasy series equally as good as the Tad Williams one - but - it's not done yet! The first 3 books are out and I was sucked into them as much as any other series I've read but the 4th book hasn't even been published yet. In fact, his web site states that he's still writing it! Chop chop Mr. Martin!
Also worth a strong mention is Terry Goodkind and the Sword of Truth series. I felt the main character was developed a bit poorly early on but the series did pick right up and was an excellent read. The final book, Pillars of Creation I have not read yet though and I've seen some poor reviews of it. But, from my understanding, the main story is mostly over at this point and the last book is more of an offshoot with some new characters.
This is kinda off topic, but semi-related. Is anyone using a backup package that can do remote backups (via TCP/IP and a DSL or T1 connection) from a customer site to a central location? I've been experimenting around with a few FTP remote backup programs and the few that I've found to work aren't robust enough (don't run as a service, easy for a user to shut off, scheduling is not very good).
Basically I'm looking for a package to put on a clients server, select their folders they want backed up, and then have it run via their internet connetion to a central server here.
Re:the beauty of credit cards
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 1
AT&T is a nightmare on ANY customer service level, but I your credit card company seems to be wrong in telling you you need to provide the "cancellation number" (was it an AT&T credit card?).
I manage a small ISP and we do about 90% of our billing onto customer credit cards. Part of my day to day is dealing with disputes (ok, maybe 1 or 2 per month) will come in as a disputed charge. I happily send the credit card company or User Agreement (account is automatically renewed until cancelled - non-use does not automatically cancel your account etc.) and Radius logs showing the user logged in after the disputed charge. Their answer is almost exactly the same - unless we have a SIGNATURE on a sales slip, then we will lose just about every dispute.
I think to 100% protect ourselves the only way would be to get each and every credit card customer to sign an authorization form that ok's us to charge them until they cancel the account.
Luckily you responded to it - if you had let that authorization from Tucows sit for 5 days, ICANN rules that you HAVE acknowledged the transfer and it would have been moved to VeriSign.
I think they dumped off a ton of unpaid domains to some other company (or, uberparanoia - to another company they secretly own...) to generate cash. I think I read they laid off about 45% of their workforce, and that their profits were down like 60%. If those numbers are correct, I can see how a serious influx of cash would look tempting for them.
What really gets me though is that I was willing to pay their price for that domain 2 years ago and they didn't want my money then! It wasn't a high profile domain either (beervana.com).
Besides the deceptive fake billing notices from VeriSign and other (American Registry?), VeriSign employs a few other sleezy tactics.
I use OpenSRS for all my registrations, and one of my customers just lost control of his domain name to VeriSign (who also stripped his e-mail, name and company name off of the domain record - and when he called VeriSign they denied any knowledge of them having the domain in their system - even though whois clearly showed it!) Anway, someone in his office paid the "invoice", thus initiating the transfer. The real registrar (OpenSRS) sends out an e-mail to the admin contact notifiying him of the transfer and providing a link and a password to approve the transfer. Unfortunately, ICANN rules state that if you do nothing in 5 days (i.e. specifically deny the transfer), that lack of action in 5 days counts as an acknowledgement to approve the transfer! Bang - bye bye domain name.
Another customer got his renewl notice from VeriSign (a legit one), paid it via credit card, and 4 days AFTER he paid it, VeriSign sold his name to a company in Taiwan. Now VeriSign is telling him there's no way to get the domain back. Argh..
And my final vent on VeriSign. I was watching a domian that expired in March 2000 on their system. I had opened up 3 separate trouble tickets with VeriSign in an attempt to get them to release the domain so I could buy it. Not once did I ever get a response back on one of my trouble tickets. I checked the domain for release almost every day - until one day I see that's it's now owned by a company in Taiwan who is just simply reselling it now for $1500.
Slashdot Mirror
Though my company is not Apple authorized, I can shed some light on their pricing model. There's are reseller costs for the various iPods as of today. While our account isn't Best Buy or CompUSA in size, we get decent pricing for our quantity levels, so these should be accurate to within a few dollars.
IPOD 10G FOR MAC & PC PERSONALIZED - $296.49
IPOD 20GB (PERSONALIZED) - $404.09
IPOD 30G FOR MAC & PC WITH DOCK WIRED REMOTE/CASE PERSONALIZED - $481.40
IPOD 40GB 10K SONGS FIREWALL EARPHONES ADPTR IPOD DOCK - $461.21
There's also absolutely zero units available on any of these with ETA from Apple looking like early 2004.
The demand for these is so high that while there's not a ton of margin on them, there's also no need to mark them down to sell them.
Tad Williams was mentioned here, but only briefly. I'll try and give a bit more detailed synopsys of 2 series of his that I've read. First is the Otherland series. Without giving too much detail, it's a 4 volume story about virtual reality gone very wrong. This isn't really some hokey "techno" novel, but one that portrays a story of something that might be possible in a few decades. Not only is the story intriguing and one of the best Sci-Fi books I've ever read, Tad Williams is a master at visualization and conveying his images into text. If you've read this series you'll know exactly what I mean - your head just fills up with mental images as you're reading this series of these fantastic (simulated) worlds.
Someone else mentioned the Memory, Sorrow & Thorn books. I'm actually on book 3 of these now and it is excellent Fantasy (way way way better than Weiss & Hickman).
Peter Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction series is drop dead amazing. I randomly picked up the first book in Heathrow for a flight back home - I still consider myself very lucky for stumbling on this fantastic series. It's true Sci-Fi in the best of the genre - space ships, battles, strange planets, alien philosophies - and of course the undead. Good enough that I will eventually go back and read it again - and it's a LONG series, but worth every page.
I'll also mention George R. R. Martin and his Fantasy series 'A Song of Fire and Ice'. Again, an excellent Fantasy series equally as good as the Tad Williams one - but - it's not done yet! The first 3 books are out and I was sucked into them as much as any other series I've read but the 4th book hasn't even been published yet. In fact, his web site states that he's still writing it! Chop chop Mr. Martin!
Also worth a strong mention is Terry Goodkind and the Sword of Truth series. I felt the main character was developed a bit poorly early on but the series did pick right up and was an excellent read. The final book, Pillars of Creation I have not read yet though and I've seen some poor reviews of it. But, from my understanding, the main story is mostly over at this point and the last book is more of an offshoot with some new characters.
This is kinda off topic, but semi-related. Is anyone using a backup package that can do remote backups (via TCP/IP and a DSL or T1 connection) from a customer site to a central location? I've been experimenting around with a few FTP remote backup programs and the few that I've found to work aren't robust enough (don't run as a service, easy for a user to shut off, scheduling is not very good).
Basically I'm looking for a package to put on a clients server, select their folders they want backed up, and then have it run via their internet connetion to a central server here.
AT&T is a nightmare on ANY customer service level, but I your credit card company seems to be wrong in telling you you need to provide the "cancellation number" (was it an AT&T credit card?).
I manage a small ISP and we do about 90% of our billing onto customer credit cards. Part of my day to day is dealing with disputes (ok, maybe 1 or 2 per month) will come in as a disputed charge. I happily send the credit card company or User Agreement (account is automatically renewed until cancelled - non-use does not automatically cancel your account etc.) and Radius logs showing the user logged in after the disputed charge. Their answer is almost exactly the same - unless we have a SIGNATURE on a sales slip, then we will lose just about every dispute.
I think to 100% protect ourselves the only way would be to get each and every credit card customer to sign an authorization form that ok's us to charge them until they cancel the account.
Luckily you responded to it - if you had let that authorization from Tucows sit for 5 days, ICANN rules that you HAVE acknowledged the transfer and it would have been moved to VeriSign.
I think they dumped off a ton of unpaid domains to some other company (or, uberparanoia - to another company they secretly own...) to generate cash. I think I read they laid off about 45% of their workforce, and that their profits were down like 60%. If those numbers are correct, I can see how a serious influx of cash would look tempting for them.
What really gets me though is that I was willing to pay their price for that domain 2 years ago and they didn't want my money then! It wasn't a high profile domain either (beervana.com).
Besides the deceptive fake billing notices from VeriSign and other (American Registry?), VeriSign employs a few other sleezy tactics.
I use OpenSRS for all my registrations, and one of my customers just lost control of his domain name to VeriSign (who also stripped his e-mail, name and company name off of the domain record - and when he called VeriSign they denied any knowledge of them having the domain in their system - even though whois clearly showed it!) Anway, someone in his office paid the "invoice", thus initiating the transfer. The real registrar (OpenSRS) sends out an e-mail to the admin contact notifiying him of the transfer and providing a link and a password to approve the transfer. Unfortunately, ICANN rules state that if you do nothing in 5 days (i.e. specifically deny the transfer), that lack of action in 5 days counts as an acknowledgement to approve the transfer! Bang - bye bye domain name.
Another customer got his renewl notice from VeriSign (a legit one), paid it via credit card, and 4 days AFTER he paid it, VeriSign sold his name to a company in Taiwan. Now VeriSign is telling him there's no way to get the domain back. Argh..
And my final vent on VeriSign. I was watching a domian that expired in March 2000 on their system. I had opened up 3 separate trouble tickets with VeriSign in an attempt to get them to release the domain so I could buy it. Not once did I ever get a response back on one of my trouble tickets. I checked the domain for release almost every day - until one day I see that's it's now owned by a company in Taiwan who is just simply reselling it now for $1500.