Ok, so their business model is to sell the hardware at cost and make money on the service. First of all, this is the same buisness model as a ton of other industries (cell phones and video game consoles come to mind). Secondly, it makes sense since otherwise you would have to shell out a ton for the hardware, which would discourage people from buying it, especially if they aren't sure if they like it, and because the product is somewhat useless without the service, which allows for easy taping of shows via current show listings.
The much-hyped Alienware laptops are actually made by a compny (can't remember the name) that are also sold as Sager's for much less, and the Sager's can be bought without an OS. However, they don't come in fruity colors like the Alienware.
Notice he has 2 1/2 pages of good feedback spanning over a few months... Then he goes in for the "Attack" all at once... ALL the bad feedback comes in a two day period.
The other interesting thing if you read the feedback is that most of the positives are of the "quick pay" variety - in other words, he was the buyer. He bought stuff to pump up his feedback rating. All the negatives are of the "didn't send item" variety where he was the seller.
As far as I know, ebay has not actually seperated buying from selling. What they do now that they didn't do before is show if the transaction was a buying or selling transaction by putting a "B" next to the feedback if the person was the buyer and an "S" if they were a seller. So if you click on the person's feedback and glance at it, you can see how many of the feedbacks were from selling versus buying, but at first glance all you will see is:
nameofebayer(feedback)*
You actually need to click on the feedback and read to find out how they got it. And the people most likely to be scammed are the least likely to do that
When I do get a non-paying bidder, I follow the eBay guidelines, eventually get a refund on my fees and relist the item
One thing that annoys me is even when you get a non-paying bidder, and go through the process of filing a non-paying bidder report (find the obscure link, submit the warning, wait 10 days, file the request for final value fees) is you only get final value fees. So you lose the initial listing fees - which can be a decent chunk if you started the auction at a high price, listed in 2 catagories, or sprung for those extras (bold, gallery, extra pictures, ect). It would be nice if you at least got part of your listing fees back when someone doesn't pay through no fault of your own.
I don't have huge amount of non-payers, but I probably have one in every 10-20 who doesn't pay. I really don't get it, especially since most of the stuff I sell is low-value
Back to the inital point though, with colleges frequently bending to give the RIAA what they want, if the RIAA would ask the universities to deal with the filesharers who have been detected with X information on Y ip address, the colleges would probably handle it internally, the courts wouldn't have to get involved, and the offenders would stop
I work for a college, and they have been doing this for the last year or so. Our network services department would get a letter about someone sharing stuff on a particular ip address. We would shut that ip down, wait for the student to call in and say that they couldn't get to the internet all of a sudden, we would check their IP against a blocked list, and if they were blocked we would have our network guys tell them what they needed to stop sharing.
My guess is that the RIAA stratagy with subpeonas is less to get particlar people to stop sharing, and more to scare people in general to stop sharing. Sort of a terristic, kill one frighten a thousand kind of thing.
I currently work 1st tier phone support at a college. This means I come into contact with people with all different levels of knowledge. I don't have a problem with people who don't know much about computers, as long as they are willing to admit that they don't know everything, and work with me to resolve the problem. I can't tell you how many people I've had call because a monitor or computer won't power on, say they have checked all the connections, and the tech comes out and finds a loose connection. I've had people want a tech to come out and create shortcuts on their desktop.
The worst is people who don't save for 3 hours, have the computer crash, and then blame tech support for the loss of their document. I had one guy who closed Word, clicked "no" on the would you like to save box, and then called us up to complain that his document was gone.
of course, angry customers are not unique to tech support. But I think the biggest problem with users is not lack of knowledge, it's lack of patience.
Maybe this is just my gut reaction, but maybe colleges should be spending their time working on EDUCATION and not SELLING MUSIC. Leave that to the music companies, stores, etc
The problem is it is already too late for that. Colleges as we speak are already having to deal with the effects of peer to peer file sharing. I work in tech services for a small college, and we have been getting cease and desist letters from the RIAA and MPAA for over a year to have us prevent students from sharing stuff. We haven't gotten any subpeonas that I know of yet, but a lot of schools are. Plus there is the huge amount of bandwidth that it consumes - don't block or restrict it, students and profs complain that they can't do research/check email/ect because of the usage. Restrict it and students are unhappy, plus their are unintended consequences (like online game play is slowed down).
colleges want to cut down huge bandwidth - and possibly large legal costs - and think this might help.
a PVR originally made by SonicBlue, now owned by digital networks, part of the company that owns Denon and Marantz. There 50x0 series (5040, 5060, and 5080) had two nifty features - commercial advance, which allows people to skip commercials while they are watching as if the were not even there, and internet programing sharing, where you can send another replayTV user a program
RePlay was sued over both these features, and the new model, the 55xx series, won't have either. It was stupid because the MPAA acted like program sharing was like Kazaa even though you had to own a replay to share, and you had to know the person on the other end - it wasn't like you could search replay shares to download. And commercial advance, while cool, is only a slight improvement over the fast forward buttons that viewers have been using to avoid commercials on recorded TV shows since VCR's were top-loading.
Well, it won't improve the content of shows, but the RePlay TV 50xx models have some things in common. While you can't download shows per se, you can share shows with friends over the internet - it comes with a modem and an ethernet jack built in. It also has comercial advance, which is pretty effective at skipping commercials so you never have to see them. It also lets you search for shows by genre, or record every episode of a show (so you can get the simpsons on syndication at 3am).
the disadvantage is the $10/month service fee. Also, rumor has it that the next models (the 55xx) won't have internet sharing or commercial advance.
It seems silly to me that people like to emphasize electric cars because they are "zero emission" (never mind that the electricity comes from somewhere, like coal-burning or nuclear power plants) when hybrid cars are much more practical, much more affordable, and nearly as clean. A Toyota Prius or Honda Civic Hybrid or Honda Insight gets absolutly silly gas milage - up to 68 mpg city for a manual insight - and costs 20 grand, compared to an 80 grand tango. Not to mention the insight can seat two people comfortably (the civic hyprid and prius seat four, but are not as efficient). And you don't have to worry about being stranded when you run out of batteries, like you do with a pure electric, or looking for an outlet to charge it, or have to borrow/rent/buy another car for long trips.
Even an all-gas subcompact is very efficient, and gas cars have gotten way cleaner - PJ O'Rourke pointed out in one of his books that a running Saab 9-3 puts out less pollution that a '68 camaro with the engine OFF
Anyway, the Tango doesn't seem that innovative when you keep in mind that the article says he got the engine out of a '68 Triumph that had already been converted to electric
The expensive part of a laptop computer isn't the process, hard drive, ram, or video card. Those are all pretty cheap standardized components. The most expensive component on the laptop is the LCD screen - and that is the one thing that would remain the same on the "stripper" laptop.
I think the appeal of Linux and OSX are totally different. I think people run Linux on the desktop because it's cheap/free and or because they are "geeks" who like the technical aspect of fooling around with it. While Linux is getting better, using linux still generally requires extra work and extra effort
The appeal of Apple is the opposite. It's known as easier, but is generally more expensive to run because of the hardware lockdown that Apple has. It appeals to people who DON'T want to have to fiddle under the hood alot, as well as to certain markets that have a hardcore base of Apple users - education and graphic artists come to mind. It also appeals to people who want hardware that just looks so much cooler and has had much more design attention than most desktop systems.
I think the two can coexist and that there is minimal overlap in the two markets.
Some may remember the deal discussion forum Fatwallet.com from when several retailers sued them because users posted Black Friday sales fliers ahead of time. They also got sued by a guy named Todd Short, who was running a fraudulent scheme where he was selling laptops, claiming you would pay him now and get your laptop several months later. Users did, never got their laptops, and posted their experiences on the forum. The forum, along with a user who created a website, got sued by Todd. Later, he declared bankrucy.
Yes, but if you read the terms of the CD price-fixing settlement, if more than a certain number of people claim the refund, it all goes to charity and the consumers get.... nothing.
Wonder how this will turn out. My guess is the law firm will get some money, HP and Fujitsu will lose some money, but consumers will get almost nothing.
There have been a number of class action laws-uits I've noticed of late where the members of the class get little or nothing. Cases in point
-Best Buy gets sued by people who didn't understand the terms of it's extended warrenty. Best Buy settles, gives coupons for more crap at best buy to the members of the class.
-Salton (maker of the george forman grill) gets sued for price fixing. Settles. Money gets paid to health charities, consumers who theoretically lost money due to overcharges get nothing
How can you patent such a concept as "buy it now?" Frankly, I love it and use it all them time -- it lets me land an eBay item before someone else does, albeit for a bit more. But hey, we'll see what happens in court. I'm behind eBay all the way on this one.
As a seller, I love it too. I sell the item faster AND get paid more for it, plus people who use it usually pay faster... I've never had a deadbeat BIN bidder, but I've had several with standard auctions.
That doesn't really apply to used items though. Used item at Amazon work the same way they do at half.com where private sellers ship the item and are reimbersed for shipping by Amazon. While they do make money on shipping on items they sell (or use it for promotional purposes) I don't think it really applies to used items
There have also been price mistakes where people have gotten boxes of 20 modems for the price of one and other things.
Actually, no. There have been items posted on Amazon for bulk packs of modems, cd rom drives, and sound cards that listed the price of one item next to a description of the bulk pack. People on deal-discussion boards thought they would try to get in on it, and ordered it, but they either had their orders cancelled or recieved only 1 item and had to fight with Amazon to return them
Supposedly, the point of Habeas is that the companies that use it are opt-in and actually have options to let you unsubscribe that let you unsubscribe instead of just sending you more spam because they know that you are an active address. Arguably, if the people who use it don't conform to not being spam, then people who manage mail servers won't let Habeas through
The only sender I've noticed using this is HarrisDirect, an online polling company. I did subscribe and am cool with getting mail from them, so I don't consider it spam. I consider that mail vastly different from some random AOL account sellin me penis enlargement pills.
The links to the google cache have pretty good descriptions of what the BlackBoard system card readers look like. In addition, if they have had the system for the last few years, some of the readers probably still have ATT&T logos.
The RIAA always says that they lose money when people pirate music. But I would bet that porn is probably second only to music at the most pirated thing on the internet, and possibly more if you look at gigs pirated instead of number of file, and you never hear Vivid going after porn pirates. Instead, porn is VERY profitable, and the only industry on the internet to consistently make money. Heck, I bet people buy more porn after seeing samples on the internet. Maybe the RIAA needs to look at the porn industry for guidance.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so their business model is to sell the hardware at cost and make money on the service. First of all, this is the same buisness model as a ton of other industries (cell phones and video game consoles come to mind). Secondly, it makes sense since otherwise you would have to shell out a ton for the hardware, which would discourage people from buying it, especially if they aren't sure if they like it, and because the product is somewhat useless without the service, which allows for easy taping of shows via current show listings.
Princeton Review - ranks on such important catagories as "most weed" and "most hard liquor"
ACLU defends Nazi's right to burn down ACLU headquarters
If your friends judge your sexuality by what hardware and operating system you use, I think it's time to get some new friends.
The much-hyped Alienware laptops are actually made by a compny (can't remember the name) that are also sold as Sager's for much less, and the Sager's can be bought without an OS. However, they don't come in fruity colors like the Alienware.
Sager laptop
Alienware
Cnet user reviews (an funny mix of people pointing out that you can get the Sager for cheaper, and Alienware fans who can't seem to understand that)
Notice he has 2 1/2 pages of good feedback spanning over a few months... Then he goes in for the "Attack" all at once... ALL the bad feedback comes in a two day period.
The other interesting thing if you read the feedback is that most of the positives are of the "quick pay" variety - in other words, he was the buyer. He bought stuff to pump up his feedback rating. All the negatives are of the "didn't send item" variety where he was the seller.
As far as I know, ebay has not actually seperated buying from selling. What they do now that they didn't do before is show if the transaction was a buying or selling transaction by putting a "B" next to the feedback if the person was the buyer and an "S" if they were a seller. So if you click on the person's feedback and glance at it, you can see how many of the feedbacks were from selling versus buying, but at first glance all you will see is:
nameofebayer(feedback)*
You actually need to click on the feedback and read to find out how they got it. And the people most likely to be scammed are the least likely to do that
When I do get a non-paying bidder, I follow the eBay guidelines, eventually get a refund on my fees and relist the item
One thing that annoys me is even when you get a non-paying bidder, and go through the process of filing a non-paying bidder report (find the obscure link, submit the warning, wait 10 days, file the request for final value fees) is you only get final value fees. So you lose the initial listing fees - which can be a decent chunk if you started the auction at a high price, listed in 2 catagories, or sprung for those extras (bold, gallery, extra pictures, ect). It would be nice if you at least got part of your listing fees back when someone doesn't pay through no fault of your own.
I don't have huge amount of non-payers, but I probably have one in every 10-20 who doesn't pay. I really don't get it, especially since most of the stuff I sell is low-value
Back to the inital point though, with colleges frequently bending to give the RIAA what they want, if the RIAA would ask the universities to deal with the filesharers who have been detected with X information on Y ip address, the colleges would probably handle it internally, the courts wouldn't have to get involved, and the offenders would stop
I work for a college, and they have been doing this for the last year or so. Our network services department would get a letter about someone sharing stuff on a particular ip address. We would shut that ip down, wait for the student to call in and say that they couldn't get to the internet all of a sudden, we would check their IP against a blocked list, and if they were blocked we would have our network guys tell them what they needed to stop sharing.
My guess is that the RIAA stratagy with subpeonas is less to get particlar people to stop sharing, and more to scare people in general to stop sharing. Sort of a terristic, kill one frighten a thousand kind of thing.
I currently work 1st tier phone support at a college. This means I come into contact with people with all different levels of knowledge. I don't have a problem with people who don't know much about computers, as long as they are willing to admit that they don't know everything, and work with me to resolve the problem. I can't tell you how many people I've had call because a monitor or computer won't power on, say they have checked all the connections, and the tech comes out and finds a loose connection. I've had people want a tech to come out and create shortcuts on their desktop.
The worst is people who don't save for 3 hours, have the computer crash, and then blame tech support for the loss of their document. I had one guy who closed Word, clicked "no" on the would you like to save box, and then called us up to complain that his document was gone.
of course, angry customers are not unique to tech support. But I think the biggest problem with users is not lack of knowledge, it's lack of patience.
Maybe this is just my gut reaction, but maybe colleges should be spending their time working on EDUCATION and not SELLING MUSIC. Leave that to the music companies, stores, etc
The problem is it is already too late for that. Colleges as we speak are already having to deal with the effects of peer to peer file sharing. I work in tech services for a small college, and we have been getting cease and desist letters from the RIAA and MPAA for over a year to have us prevent students from sharing stuff. We haven't gotten any subpeonas that I know of yet, but a lot of schools are. Plus there is the huge amount of bandwidth that it consumes - don't block or restrict it, students and profs complain that they can't do research/check email/ect because of the usage. Restrict it and students are unhappy, plus their are unintended consequences (like online game play is slowed down).
colleges want to cut down huge bandwidth - and possibly large legal costs - and think this might help.a PVR originally made by SonicBlue, now owned by digital networks, part of the company that owns Denon and Marantz. There 50x0 series (5040, 5060, and 5080) had two nifty features - commercial advance, which allows people to skip commercials while they are watching as if the were not even there, and internet programing sharing, where you can send another replayTV user a program
RePlay was sued over both these features, and the new model, the 55xx series, won't have either. It was stupid because the MPAA acted like program sharing was like Kazaa even though you had to own a replay to share, and you had to know the person on the other end - it wasn't like you could search replay shares to download. And commercial advance, while cool, is only a slight improvement over the fast forward buttons that viewers have been using to avoid commercials on recorded TV shows since VCR's were top-loading.
Well, it won't improve the content of shows, but the RePlay TV 50xx models have some things in common. While you can't download shows per se, you can share shows with friends over the internet - it comes with a modem and an ethernet jack built in. It also has comercial advance, which is pretty effective at skipping commercials so you never have to see them. It also lets you search for shows by genre, or record every episode of a show (so you can get the simpsons on syndication at 3am).
the disadvantage is the $10/month service fee. Also, rumor has it that the next models (the 55xx) won't have internet sharing or commercial advance.
.
It seems silly to me that people like to emphasize electric cars because they are "zero emission" (never mind that the electricity comes from somewhere, like coal-burning or nuclear power plants) when hybrid cars are much more practical, much more affordable, and nearly as clean. A Toyota Prius or Honda Civic Hybrid or Honda Insight gets absolutly silly gas milage - up to 68 mpg city for a manual insight - and costs 20 grand, compared to an 80 grand tango. Not to mention the insight can seat two people comfortably (the civic hyprid and prius seat four, but are not as efficient). And you don't have to worry about being stranded when you run out of batteries, like you do with a pure electric, or looking for an outlet to charge it, or have to borrow/rent/buy another car for long trips.
Even an all-gas subcompact is very efficient, and gas cars have gotten way cleaner - PJ O'Rourke pointed out in one of his books that a running Saab 9-3 puts out less pollution that a '68 camaro with the engine OFF
Anyway, the Tango doesn't seem that innovative when you keep in mind that the article says he got the engine out of a '68 Triumph that had already been converted to electric
The expensive part of a laptop computer isn't the process, hard drive, ram, or video card. Those are all pretty cheap standardized components. The most expensive component on the laptop is the LCD screen - and that is the one thing that would remain the same on the "stripper" laptop.
I think the appeal of Linux and OSX are totally different. I think people run Linux on the desktop because it's cheap/free and or because they are "geeks" who like the technical aspect of fooling around with it. While Linux is getting better, using linux still generally requires extra work and extra effort
The appeal of Apple is the opposite. It's known as easier, but is generally more expensive to run because of the hardware lockdown that Apple has. It appeals to people who DON'T want to have to fiddle under the hood alot, as well as to certain markets that have a hardcore base of Apple users - education and graphic artists come to mind. It also appeals to people who want hardware that just looks so much cooler and has had much more design attention than most desktop systems.
I think the two can coexist and that there is minimal overlap in the two markets.
Some may remember the deal discussion forum Fatwallet.com from when several retailers sued them because users posted Black Friday sales fliers ahead of time. They also got sued by a guy named Todd Short, who was running a fraudulent scheme where he was selling laptops, claiming you would pay him now and get your laptop several months later. Users did, never got their laptops, and posted their experiences on the forum. The forum, along with a user who created a website, got sued by Todd. Later, he declared bankrucy.
Fatwallet JC Morris Thread
Website about JC Morris Scam
Yes, but if you read the terms of the CD price-fixing settlement, if more than a certain number of people claim the refund, it all goes to charity and the consumers get.... nothing.
Wonder how this will turn out. My guess is the law firm will get some money, HP and Fujitsu will lose some money, but consumers will get almost nothing.
There have been a number of class action laws-uits I've noticed of late where the members of the class get little or nothing. Cases in point
-Best Buy gets sued by people who didn't understand the terms of it's extended warrenty. Best Buy settles, gives coupons for more crap at best buy to the members of the class.
-Salton (maker of the george forman grill) gets sued for price fixing. Settles. Money gets paid to health charities, consumers who theoretically lost money due to overcharges get nothing
There are a ton of similar cases.
How can you patent such a concept as "buy it now?" Frankly, I love it and use it all them time -- it lets me land an eBay item before someone else does, albeit for a bit more. But hey, we'll see what happens in court. I'm behind eBay all the way on this one.
As a seller, I love it too. I sell the item faster AND get paid more for it, plus people who use it usually pay faster... I've never had a deadbeat BIN bidder, but I've had several with standard auctions.
That doesn't really apply to used items though. Used item at Amazon work the same way they do at half.com where private sellers ship the item and are reimbersed for shipping by Amazon. While they do make money on shipping on items they sell (or use it for promotional purposes) I don't think it really applies to used items
There have also been price mistakes where people have gotten boxes of 20 modems for the price of one and other things.
Actually, no. There have been items posted on Amazon for bulk packs of modems, cd rom drives, and sound cards that listed the price of one item next to a description of the bulk pack. People on deal-discussion boards thought they would try to get in on it, and ordered it, but they either had their orders cancelled or recieved only 1 item and had to fight with Amazon to return them
Supposedly, the point of Habeas is that the companies that use it are opt-in and actually have options to let you unsubscribe that let you unsubscribe instead of just sending you more spam because they know that you are an active address. Arguably, if the people who use it don't conform to not being spam, then people who manage mail servers won't let Habeas through
The only sender I've noticed using this is HarrisDirect, an online polling company. I did subscribe and am cool with getting mail from them, so I don't consider it spam. I consider that mail vastly different from some random AOL account sellin me penis enlargement pills.
The links to the google cache have pretty good descriptions of what the BlackBoard system card readers look like. In addition, if they have had the system for the last few years, some of the readers probably still have ATT&T logos.
The RIAA always says that they lose money when people pirate music. But I would bet that porn is probably second only to music at the most pirated thing on the internet, and possibly more if you look at gigs pirated instead of number of file, and you never hear Vivid going after porn pirates. Instead, porn is VERY profitable, and the only industry on the internet to consistently make money. Heck, I bet people buy more porn after seeing samples on the internet. Maybe the RIAA needs to look at the porn industry for guidance.