While not directly related to the story at hand, I do have a question...
What's the origin of this phrase? I'm seeing it, or variations of it everywhere, but can't seem to track down what it all came from. Some movie I'd guess, but I don't know which one...
google isn't much help, as the (ab)use of the phrase has really taken off, and it's now everywhere, and it's hard to tell who used it first.
On the same line of reasoning, when you pirate a game even if you "wouldn't have spent your money on it in the first place" you are spending your time on it. This possibly takes time away from the time you might use to play other games you might actually be willing to spend your money on, therefore maybe not hurting the developer of the game you pirated directly, but certainly hurting the industry they are part of. Now if you would never spend money on any game, then I guess this is a moot point, but somehow I think that if it weren't so easy to pirate games, there indeed would be more people who bought them.
Wow. That's quite a paragraph.
If I understand it correctly, I think I now understand why the PC game industry is hurting. It's because I'm playing fewer PC games -- instead, I'm spending more time with my family, and more time flying R/C planes and helicopters (which is sort of like games, but I end up tan, in better physical shape and when you screw up, it's harder to fix than just reloading your last saved game.)
So, they should just sue my wife, kids and Tower Hobbies.
And while you're preaching to us to turn the other cheek, I suggest you take a look at Gandi's death -- shot dead at a prayer meeting in New Delhi by Nathuram Godse .
To be fair, I didn't know how Gandi died before I decided to respond to your post, as don't always remember the finer points of history, but I did remember the general idea that people with lots of influence often create lots of enemies, and considering that Gandi's general philosophy probably didn't provide him with lots of protection, the odds of him coming to an unfortunate end were rather high...
Personally, if somebody put something up like this Mosquito device in our neighborhood, I would not turn the other cheek. Being 37, I guess I couldn't hear it, but all it would take would be for my kids (ages 3 and 5) or some other neighborhood kids to tell me about it and let me know what it is, and I would make it my crusade to make the police aware of it, even going so far as finding a way to measure the noise to convince the police that it's there (though I'm surprised that they dismiss the claim out of hand as reported.) I'd even put a few hundred dollars into suing the guy, I'd sick the neighborhood association on him (as odious as they are), and if all of those methods failed, I'd even be inclined to physically destory it somehow.
People who do things like that are NOT the sort of people I'd want in my neighborhood.
And besides, I thought if you wanted the teenagers to go away, you just played Barry Manilow and Perry Como records?
How cant this be a hack, He plugged an antenna into his phone and got better reception.
I tend to agree, though cell phones generally aren't designed to accept external antennas much anymore. Sometimes they do have plugs, but you can't really get to them...
Though I'd argue that creating a passive repeater (high gain antenna outside, aimed at tower, low gain antenna inside) qualifies as at least clever, if not a bonafide hack (though the `hack' status would come only from cell phones generally being made to work like `magic'.) But there certainly is a lot to be said for taking your interior room from zero bars to five bars without even physically touching your phone!
Eh? Hobby-grade R/C plane gear has a range of about 1.5 miles -- about 3x further than you can even see a 2 meter wingspan plane (at 1/2 mile, a 2 meter plane is a speck in the sky. If you have good eyes, you might be able to tell what direction it's pointed, but little more.)
Hobby-grade R/C car gear is similar, but the cars are a good deal smaller -- I'll bet you could barely see your car at 1/8th mile. So what would he need all this extra range for?
In any case, for those that RTFA, it would be quite a scary pool to be swimming in, with all those magnents around the edge of the pool.
I don't think they're magnets -- they're more `actuators' or `wave generators' (and probably do contain magnets.) But point taken...
In any event, a fast fourier transform (FFT) can be used to describe any arbitrary waveform as a series of frequencies and amplitudes (and phases I guess) -- I guess that this is just people doing the opposite, using a series of wave generators to create an arbitrary waveform -- but to do it in 2D rather than just in 1D. (Or 3D rather than 2D, depending on how you look at it.)
Pretty clever, but like many others, I don't see a lot of use for it. Perhaps they can refine it to make some sort of new data display that we've never seen before? Write a message in clouds (yes, that's a big jump), for example? Think of the advertising opportunities!
When I questioned the legality of this the operator told me to 'get a lawyer and have them contact the legal department.' Obviously, this is an option but seems rather to be a bit extreme and I'm sure the company realizes it.
Extreme or not, that IS the appropriate answer. They'll probably back off immediately with a simple letter from a law firm, and if that's all it takes, it won't even cost much.
If you really want to stick it to them, you might be able to get the local TV news to do a story on the practice (around here, Austin, TX, we have `[channel] 7 on your side' stories, where they go into detail about how somebody was being screwed and how the TV cameras made all the problems go away.
There are apocryphal anecdotes that the crew of the Apollo missions were issued poison pins laced with cyanide just in case they could not get into a proper reentry slot and skipped off into space for eternity.
I've heard these stories too, but don't really believe them. In any event, a poison pin has at least two problems: 1) in a space suit, your mobility is EXTREMELY limited. I don't see how you'd be able to reach anything inside your suit to be able to poke yourself with it (or take a pill or anything like that.) I (seriously!) wonder if part of their training was long periods of being itched by something and being unable to scratch it?, and 2) since you can't reach yourself to prick yourself, there would have to be some sort of automatic pricker, activated somehow -- but would you really want something like that near you, just waiting for a malfunction or even a simple bump to end your life?
Yes, it would suck if you drifted away from capsule/ISS/shuttle, but it doesn't sound like a really painful death, as far as deaths go. The CO2 levels would go up, the O2 levels would go down, you'd fall asleep and you'd die. (I know your `breathe!' reflex is triggered by high CO2 levels rather than low O2 levels in your blood, and dying like this might feel like drowning, but I think I'd rather risk this than a poison pin an inch away from my skin somewhere.)
It doesn't matter. NXDOMAIN response needs to exist for a lot of other reasons that makes the 14 year old myspace user getting an ugly error message over a spammer's search page irrelevant.
You're forgetting who their target audience is... end users. Grandma, as it were.
Your ISP's servers will not be using this for their DNS servers. In fact, nobody's servers will be using it. The only systems that will use it are desktop systems, probably only desktop systems used by less technical users.
I hated `SiteFinder' for many reasons, but I have no problems with this, and even see where it would be useful. Considering that many (most?) desktop users only hit web sites and maybe some chat or game sites, and their system never resolves any MX records at all (mail is sent by routing it through the ISP's server, and that's specified via a standard `A' record) the things that really made SiteFinder a bad idea (even beyond it not being optional) aren't issues here.
The PC contains a hard drive upon which accumulates the big wad of crap that accumulates as they use it.
I can't argue with the `big wad o' crap' idea, and how it mostly goes away with the purchase of a new computer, but I disagree with what happens when they get a new computer. The new computer has a small wad of crap (mostly the stuff that the vendor includes) and the user starts going through things that they need and installing them (they probably still have cds if they paid for it, after all) -- AOL, Quicken, QuickBooks, Office, Photoshop (or any of the many less functional clones), etc. Sure, there's non-Windows equivilents for many of these, but 1) how would the person find them if they don't know where to look?, and 2) the replacements often aren't as functional as the Windows version, and even if they are, they're usually different to use.
I say this as someone who finally made the plunge and bought a color VGA monitor (grayscale was just fine up until then) to play SimEarth (the MS-DOS version, on my '286).
And I finally bought a PC (an Amstrad 8086) to play Ultima 6, which was the first not available for my Apple II. I'm not sure how this is relevant, however.
No, he didn't say that at all. What he said (well, what you quoted) --
Anyone with the extra scap around to build a custom PC would be more than willing to shell out $99 for WinXP Home.
Now, I don't really agree with the anyone part, but most people? Probably. Grandma? Almost certainly. They might not be really willing, but given the choice between that and downloading NetBSD for free (if they even know of it or it's alternatives) and learning something new that will probably not work with all the applications they have, they're likely to decide that paying for Windows is the lesser of two evils.
I have broadband and can download NetBSD for free, ya know.
Yes, and Microsoft probably doesn't care about you, and WGA probably isn't aimed at you.
I think it may be the last dollars Redmond ever sees from me.
I'm not keen on paying for Windows (but I do have a legal copy on the computer I run Windows on for playing games), but I've found some of the games to come out of Redmond to be quite worth the money, and some of the hardware they sell is top notch as well -- for example, I'm very happy with the Microsoft optical mice I've got. And once hacked, the original Xbox makes a very nice media player...
When you're dealing with my data and my deadlines even a failure rate of 0.001% is too damn high by several orders of magnitude
Considering that a failure rate of 0.001% corresponds to only 1 in 100,000, or if you see it as downtime, five minutes per year, and you feel that you need several orders of magnitude better than that, you might want to consider just how important your data and deadlines are, because you won't find many things that are anywhere near that reliable. Certainly not any single units of the computer hardware or software available today. Not even your body itself -- statistically, the odds of you dying in the next 24 hours are likely to be signifigantly more than 1:100,000.
And considering that you brought this up in the context of Windows is doubly amazing -- I've found that Windows (or one of it's drivers, or an application tha runs on it, or the hardware it runs on, etc.) fails in one way or another rather often. If you want the sort of reliablity you're talking about, you're going to need something better than PCs, a better OS than Windows, and you'll probably need quite a few backups just in case something does fail.
In neither case is knowing what books he's borrowed from the public library going to make any difference at all - it's just the police being halfwits.
I know this is old news now, but if I understand correctly, the police weren't just curious about what books the guy was reading. Instead, the girl didn't know who the guy was, but had a general description of the guy and knew that he was holding a specific (unusual?) book. The police assumed that the book was probably checked out from the library (apparantly not this library, but another one) and so they got the records on who had checked out this book, and went and checked him out, and he matched her description of the guy, and that's how they found him.
I'd say that qualifies as good police work, as long as the proper legal steps (such as getting the subpeonas) are taken.
You are essentially claming that something must be a violation of the TOS to be unfair.
Basically, yes. Everybody can snipe if they choose to do so -- it's not even difficult. So what's not fair? It's not like some people can snipe and some can't. If sniping gives you an advantage, and you want that that advantage, snipe.
A select few get access to everyone else's bids, but no one ever gets to see theirs?
Well, considering that you (or anybody else) can make yourself `one of the select few' by merely timing your bid appropriately, it sounds fair to me. If you look at the definition of fair, the relevant entry is Consistent with rules, logic, or ethics: a fair tactic.
Considering that Ebay has set the rules, and sniping is within them, sniping obviously fits that part of the definition.
I'm not sure logic really applies here, and as for ethics, considering that anybody can snipe merely by choosing to do so, I don't even see an ethical problem there.
(Now, if only certain people could snipe, then I might agree that it's unfair. But that's not the case.)
I think its moraly wrong to call that, if that indeed is what happens often, customer care becuase thats lieing, your not taking care of the customer at all.
It's all a matter of perspective. For most customers, `customer care' probably helps the customer. I imagine that most people who call whatever cell phone company's support line get the assistance they need. The last time I called my cell phone provider (and the only time, actually -- it's a work phone, so I didn't set it up) was to have them reset my voice mail password. They did so quickly and I was happy with the service I was provided. It cost them very little to make me happy (as I was easily pleased at the time), and they did.
Arg, big businesses piss me off so much sometimes, anyway
Small business isn't really fundamentally any better. And any business, big or small, who always gives the customer what they want, no matter what, will eventually either 1) change their policy, or 2) go out of business as customers learn this and start taking advantage of it.
The best way to get something is not to bid at the last moment, but to bid the most money. It works for me.
Yes, bidding the most money always works. Can I have your email address so I can let you know if I ever do decide to start selling stuff on Ebay?:)
However, sniping DOES work, and while you still only win if you bid the most money, the issue is that your early bid will influence other bidders, generally causing them to bid more than if you hadn't bid. So, by sniping, while you'll still only win if you bid the most money, you might be able to win by bidding less than if you'd bid early in the auction, or a bid that would have lost if made early in the auction becomes a winner.
Ultimately, 1) Do you want a bargain, and don't care if you lose (because if you lose, it's not a bargain anymore?) If so, the best strategy is to snipe in the last few seconds with a price that would get you a bargain. 2) Do you need the item, no matter what, but don't want to spend more than you have to? Snipe in the last few seconds for far more than the item is worth. 3) Do you need the item, no matter what, and don't care how much you pay? Bid whenever you want, for far more than the item is worth.
Note that situations #2 and #3 aren't quite equal in their ability to get you the item `no matter what', because #2 is still more likely to win assuming the same bid amount. An early 10x the value bid might make somebody else who also must have the item realize that their huge (but only 4x the value) bid isn't enough after all, and so they'll make it even larger (20x the value), and suddenly your impossibly huge bid isn't the largest anymore. But had you waited until the last minute, your 10x the value bid would have won.
The study is flawed, it asked the stupid question, not the smart one.
Well, I agree with your post almost completely, and have said the same thing over and over over the years, but ultimately I don't quite completely agree.
`Winning at Ebay' means different things to different people.
- If you must have something, no matter what, the winning strategy is indeed to apply your `Moron's Ebay Strategy', though I'd suggest that sniping would still be a good plan, just in case there's sometbody else who also must have the item but decided only to bid 4x what it's worth.
- If you're looking for a bargain, then you do what you described, but you also want to snipe it, because you don't want people to notice this auction, and each time somebody bids on it, it not only drives up the price, but it attracts attention which may bring more people to bid.
- And of course if you're a seller, winning means getting the most money possible for your item. There's an art to this, and while I've never sold anything on Ebay myself, it's quite clear who's good at it and who's not, and often the exact same item can go for twice as much money or more if sold by somebody who knows what they're doing vs. somebody who doesn't.
In any event, most buyers on Ebay are somewhere between the two extremes -- they want the item, but they want a bargain. If it's too expensive, they'll just let it go, and if it's really cheap, they might accept something that's not exactly what they wanted.
Ultimately, the best bargains on Ebay that you'll ever get will be the items that nobody else bid on (and if the item is good, this is usually due to a mispelling, or it being put in the wrong location, etc -- seller mistakes), that you were the only one who bid, but the problem is that there's lots of other people also looking for these bargains, and few items don't get any bids at all unless the initial price is too high or the item is just plain junk. But if somebody else sees that you bid on it, they may wonder what you know that they don't know -- the value of the item just went up in their eyes.
If you want to BUY something, go to the store.
Can't argue with that. But it's amazing how many people don't do this, even for stuff that they can buy at their local store!
then, what you are effectively saying is that ebay might as well become a "sealed bid" auction, where the bids aren't posted and you don't know whether you won or lost until the end...
I think you've hit the nail on the head there. Though, I think that what most of the `sniping isn't fair!' crowd would really prefer is a `semi-sealed bid' auction -- where bids are sealed to everybody but them.
Like it or not, sniping is fully within the rules set up by the auction, and is threfore pretty much fair by definition. If you don't like it, don't use Ebay... go somewhere else. Or ask Ebay to auto-extend any auction bid within X seconds of closing by Y more seconds, which would greatly reduce the benefit of sniping. (Personally, I'm surprisued that Ebay hasn't done this already.)
Re:And this is indeed a serious problem with EBay.
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How to Win on Ebay: Snipe
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· Score: 2, Informative
Any buyer with brains will determine an accurate value for an item, set his max bid appropriately, and let the proxy do his work him, and never re-bid higher than his maximum.
`With any brains' is a bit arrogant, don't you think? (And yes, I know it wasn't originally your phrase.)
Ultimately, sniping works, because not everybody uses Ebay `in the optimal way'. If everybody did what you suggested, then you're right -- sniping would not help. But not everybody does this!
Ultimately, even those people who understand how proxy bidding works often don't bid the maximum they're willing to pay. Well, they might think they are, but as soon as somebody outbids them, they realize that they are willing to pay more, and they enter in another bid. Often this continues several times, and you find people spending far more for things that they could just go down to Wal-Mart and buy brand new.
If you are willing to spend $100 on something, it benefits you to make that $100 bid in the last ten seconds, because by doing so you deny somebody else the realization that they were just outbid and the time to enter in a new bid. By doing so, you generally get it for less money (or increase the odds that you're the highest bidder, take your pick.)
Sniping works. Granted, it works because not everybody uses Ebay `in the optimal way', but either way, it works. (And by `works' I mean is that it often (usually?) gets you the item at a lower price than bidding the same amount early in the auction would have.)
The only signifigant downside to sniping is that you can miss your bid entirely by forgetting to make the bid, or making it too slowly, or being unable to do so due to network issues or something, but by using a program or service to snipe for you these risks are minimized. (An insignifigant downside to sniping is that if two people bid the same amount, the first bid wins, but in practice this generally only means that you'll pay another dollar or so for something. It also helps if you set your maximum bid to a bit over some even value. For example, don't bid $100. Instead, bid $101.24, which will beat $100, $101 and $101.23. Most other people will just bid $100...)
Triangulating a mobile phone to within a couple of hundred meters (frequently less than that) does not require police on foot, with three antennas.
Not only that, but triangulation generally only requires two antennas, not three. Each (directional) antenna (and receiver) gives you the direction of the signal, and then you find where those two rays intersect, and that's where the transmitter is. And if the transmitter isn't moving, you can do it with one antenna -- just take a reading, then move somewhere else, and take another reading.
Of course, in real life it's not quite that simple. Radio signals tend to bounce off of things like buildings, and so a given signal may appear to be coming from several directions. And when you get close to a signal, it's often hard to attenuate the signal enough so that your directional antenna and receiver can tell which direction has the strongest signal -- instead, they're all `off the chart'. But the ham radio guys do it all the time -- usually just for fun, but every once in a while they use it for something serious, like to find somebody who needs help or the source of some sort of interference.
Now, you can also determine where something is by determining how far away it is by the strength of the signal from several locations, and under perfect conditions this would require three receivers to uniquely identify the location of the transmitter, but this is 1) generally less precise than what I described above, and 2) isn't even triangulation -- it's trilateration. (But then again, some people use the word triangulation to describe any sort of related activity.)
Basicly what this tells me is that "customer care" is not at all about the customer at all.
Well, you could argue about who it's really for all you want, but ultimately if you can spend a little money and keep your customers happy, and therefore make sure they remain your customer, that's usually a good business decision. That's what customer care is generally all about -- keep the customer happy, and they'll stay your customer, and tell their friends, spend more money with you, etc.
Now, spending a whole lot of money to make a single customer happy, far more money than you can make from him and anybody he's likely to tell about his happyness or his unhappyness, that's probably not a good decision. The trick is to find the line between the two.
While I thank the person for writing this, I think he should get a new job that isn't so moraly wrong.
There's nothing morally wrong about any of this.
Granted, the person described a place where `the customer isn't always right', but that's not `morally wrong' -- it's reality. Customers *do* lie to support people, and any situation where you assume that everybody is telling the truth, even when you strongly suspect that they're not, is a situation where you're likely to be taken advantage of.
(And really, if you do find a place that says `the customer is always right', odds are that they don't really mean it. They may try to give the customer the benefit of the doubt whenever possible, but always right? No. Doubt me? Go in and tell them they owe you $100,000. See how far that gets you.
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What's the origin of this phrase? I'm seeing it, or variations of it everywhere, but can't seem to track down what it all came from. Some movie I'd guess, but I don't know which one
google isn't much help, as the (ab)use of the phrase has really taken off, and it's now everywhere, and it's hard to tell who used it first.
Either way, I think it's one of the greatest pieces of software ever written, and use it for all sorts of things.
If I understand it correctly, I think I now understand why the PC game industry is hurting. It's because I'm playing fewer PC games -- instead, I'm spending more time with my family, and more time flying R/C planes and helicopters (which is sort of like games, but I end up tan, in better physical shape and when you screw up, it's harder to fix than just reloading your last saved game.)
So, they should just sue my wife, kids and Tower Hobbies.
Yeah, I noticed that after I posted. It wasn't worth another post to correct, however. The original poster said Ghandi, which is also wrong.
To be fair, I didn't know how Gandi died before I decided to respond to your post, as don't always remember the finer points of history, but I did remember the general idea that people with lots of influence often create lots of enemies, and considering that Gandi's general philosophy probably didn't provide him with lots of protection, the odds of him coming to an unfortunate end were rather high
Personally, if somebody put something up like this Mosquito device in our neighborhood, I would not turn the other cheek. Being 37, I guess I couldn't hear it, but all it would take would be for my kids (ages 3 and 5) or some other neighborhood kids to tell me about it and let me know what it is, and I would make it my crusade to make the police aware of it, even going so far as finding a way to measure the noise to convince the police that it's there (though I'm surprised that they dismiss the claim out of hand as reported.) I'd even put a few hundred dollars into suing the guy, I'd sick the neighborhood association on him (as odious as they are), and if all of those methods failed, I'd even be inclined to physically destory it somehow.
People who do things like that are NOT the sort of people I'd want in my neighborhood.
And besides, I thought if you wanted the teenagers to go away, you just played Barry Manilow and Perry Como records?
Though I'd argue that creating a passive repeater (high gain antenna outside, aimed at tower, low gain antenna inside) qualifies as at least clever, if not a bonafide hack (though the `hack' status would come only from cell phones generally being made to work like `magic'.) But there certainly is a lot to be said for taking your interior room from zero bars to five bars without even physically touching your phone!
Hobby-grade R/C car gear is similar, but the cars are a good deal smaller -- I'll bet you could barely see your car at 1/8th mile. So what would he need all this extra range for?
In any event, a fast fourier transform (FFT) can be used to describe any arbitrary waveform as a series of frequencies and amplitudes (and phases I guess) -- I guess that this is just people doing the opposite, using a series of wave generators to create an arbitrary waveform -- but to do it in 2D rather than just in 1D. (Or 3D rather than 2D, depending on how you look at it.)
Pretty clever, but like many others, I don't see a lot of use for it. Perhaps they can refine it to make some sort of new data display that we've never seen before? Write a message in clouds (yes, that's a big jump), for example? Think of the advertising opportunities!
If you really want to stick it to them, you might be able to get the local TV news to do a story on the practice (around here, Austin, TX, we have `[channel] 7 on your side' stories, where they go into detail about how somebody was being screwed and how the TV cameras made all the problems go away.
But yes, the point about things like locks and encrypted source only providing only limited protection is well taken.
Yes, it would suck if you drifted away from capsule/ISS/shuttle, but it doesn't sound like a really painful death, as far as deaths go. The CO2 levels would go up, the O2 levels would go down, you'd fall asleep and you'd die. (I know your `breathe!' reflex is triggered by high CO2 levels rather than low O2 levels in your blood, and dying like this might feel like drowning, but I think I'd rather risk this than a poison pin an inch away from my skin somewhere.)
Your ISP's servers will not be using this for their DNS servers. In fact, nobody's servers will be using it. The only systems that will use it are desktop systems, probably only desktop systems used by less technical users.
I hated `SiteFinder' for many reasons, but I have no problems with this, and even see where it would be useful. Considering that many (most?) desktop users only hit web sites and maybe some chat or game sites, and their system never resolves any MX records at all (mail is sent by routing it through the ISP's server, and that's specified via a standard `A' record) the things that really made SiteFinder a bad idea (even beyond it not being optional) aren't issues here.
And considering that you brought this up in the context of Windows is doubly amazing -- I've found that Windows (or one of it's drivers, or an application tha runs on it, or the hardware it runs on, etc.) fails in one way or another rather often. If you want the sort of reliablity you're talking about, you're going to need something better than PCs, a better OS than Windows, and you'll probably need quite a few backups just in case something does fail.
I'd say that qualifies as good police work, as long as the proper legal steps (such as getting the subpeonas) are taken.
Considering that Ebay has set the rules, and sniping is within them, sniping obviously fits that part of the definition. I'm not sure logic really applies here, and as for ethics, considering that anybody can snipe merely by choosing to do so, I don't even see an ethical problem there.
(Now, if only certain people could snipe, then I might agree that it's unfair. But that's not the case.)
So yes, I think I understand the word just fine.
However, sniping DOES work, and while you still only win if you bid the most money, the issue is that your early bid will influence other bidders, generally causing them to bid more than if you hadn't bid. So, by sniping, while you'll still only win if you bid the most money, you might be able to win by bidding less than if you'd bid early in the auction, or a bid that would have lost if made early in the auction becomes a winner.
Ultimately, 1) Do you want a bargain, and don't care if you lose (because if you lose, it's not a bargain anymore?) If so, the best strategy is to snipe in the last few seconds with a price that would get you a bargain. 2) Do you need the item, no matter what, but don't want to spend more than you have to? Snipe in the last few seconds for far more than the item is worth. 3) Do you need the item, no matter what, and don't care how much you pay? Bid whenever you want, for far more than the item is worth.
Note that situations #2 and #3 aren't quite equal in their ability to get you the item `no matter what', because #2 is still more likely to win assuming the same bid amount. An early 10x the value bid might make somebody else who also must have the item realize that their huge (but only 4x the value) bid isn't enough after all, and so they'll make it even larger (20x the value), and suddenly your impossibly huge bid isn't the largest anymore. But had you waited until the last minute, your 10x the value bid would have won.
`Winning at Ebay' means different things to different people.
- If you must have something, no matter what, the winning strategy is indeed to apply your `Moron's Ebay Strategy', though I'd suggest that sniping would still be a good plan, just in case there's sometbody else who also must have the item but decided only to bid 4x what it's worth.
- If you're looking for a bargain, then you do what you described, but you also want to snipe it, because you don't want people to notice this auction, and each time somebody bids on it, it not only drives up the price, but it attracts attention which may bring more people to bid.
- And of course if you're a seller, winning means getting the most money possible for your item. There's an art to this, and while I've never sold anything on Ebay myself, it's quite clear who's good at it and who's not, and often the exact same item can go for twice as much money or more if sold by somebody who knows what they're doing vs. somebody who doesn't.
In any event, most buyers on Ebay are somewhere between the two extremes -- they want the item, but they want a bargain. If it's too expensive, they'll just let it go, and if it's really cheap, they might accept something that's not exactly what they wanted.
Ultimately, the best bargains on Ebay that you'll ever get will be the items that nobody else bid on (and if the item is good, this is usually due to a mispelling, or it being put in the wrong location, etc -- seller mistakes), that you were the only one who bid, but the problem is that there's lots of other people also looking for these bargains, and few items don't get any bids at all unless the initial price is too high or the item is just plain junk. But if somebody else sees that you bid on it, they may wonder what you know that they don't know -- the value of the item just went up in their eyes.
Can't argue with that. But it's amazing how many people don't do this, even for stuff that they can buy at their local store!Like it or not, sniping is fully within the rules set up by the auction, and is threfore pretty much fair by definition. If you don't like it, don't use Ebay
Ultimately, sniping works, because not everybody uses Ebay `in the optimal way'. If everybody did what you suggested, then you're right -- sniping would not help. But not everybody does this!
Ultimately, even those people who understand how proxy bidding works often don't bid the maximum they're willing to pay. Well, they might think they are, but as soon as somebody outbids them, they realize that they are willing to pay more, and they enter in another bid. Often this continues several times, and you find people spending far more for things that they could just go down to Wal-Mart and buy brand new.
If you are willing to spend $100 on something, it benefits you to make that $100 bid in the last ten seconds, because by doing so you deny somebody else the realization that they were just outbid and the time to enter in a new bid. By doing so, you generally get it for less money (or increase the odds that you're the highest bidder, take your pick.)
Sniping works. Granted, it works because not everybody uses Ebay `in the optimal way', but either way, it works. (And by `works' I mean is that it often (usually?) gets you the item at a lower price than bidding the same amount early in the auction would have.)
The only signifigant downside to sniping is that you can miss your bid entirely by forgetting to make the bid, or making it too slowly, or being unable to do so due to network issues or something, but by using a program or service to snipe for you these risks are minimized. (An insignifigant downside to sniping is that if two people bid the same amount, the first bid wins, but in practice this generally only means that you'll pay another dollar or so for something. It also helps if you set your maximum bid to a bit over some even value. For example, don't bid $100. Instead, bid $101.24, which will beat $100, $101 and $101.23. Most other people will just bid $100 ...)
Of course, in real life it's not quite that simple. Radio signals tend to bounce off of things like buildings, and so a given signal may appear to be coming from several directions. And when you get close to a signal, it's often hard to attenuate the signal enough so that your directional antenna and receiver can tell which direction has the strongest signal -- instead, they're all `off the chart'. But the ham radio guys do it all the time -- usually just for fun, but every once in a while they use it for something serious, like to find somebody who needs help or the source of some sort of interference.
Now, you can also determine where something is by determining how far away it is by the strength of the signal from several locations, and under perfect conditions this would require three receivers to uniquely identify the location of the transmitter, but this is 1) generally less precise than what I described above, and 2) isn't even triangulation -- it's trilateration. (But then again, some people use the word triangulation to describe any sort of related activity.)
Now, spending a whole lot of money to make a single customer happy, far more money than you can make from him and anybody he's likely to tell about his happyness or his unhappyness, that's probably not a good decision. The trick is to find the line between the two.
There's nothing morally wrong about any of this.Granted, the person described a place where `the customer isn't always right', but that's not `morally wrong' -- it's reality. Customers *do* lie to support people, and any situation where you assume that everybody is telling the truth, even when you strongly suspect that they're not, is a situation where you're likely to be taken advantage of.
(And really, if you do find a place that says `the customer is always right', odds are that they don't really mean it. They may try to give the customer the benefit of the doubt whenever possible, but always right? No. Doubt me? Go in and tell them they owe you $100,000. See how far that gets you.