Me, I am against the ruling. There is no reason ever to have a price floor. If you can't compete with Walmart, then find another business.
How about this hypothetical: Let's say you are a manufacturer and create very high end, luxury automobiles. They normally sell from $500,000 - $1,000,000 each. C'mon, no car costs that much money to produce but you sell enough to make some money, stay in business, etc. Of course there is R&D but divided out over the few hundred cars that you sell that is fine and dandy.
Let's say some large retailer (Wal-Mart or Joe's Automall) decides to order 2 or 3 times as many that you normally produce and wishes to have the R&D split out drastically reducing the cost per vehicle so that they can sell the $1,000,000 models for under $200,000. I guess they they should be able to do that, right?
Wrong, you want to produce luxury autos and status is what people are paying for (exclusive limited run of vehicles) so, you can set a bottom floor on prices (perhaps $300,000 - $850,000) to protect your brand and market under this new ruling.
Of course Joe's Automall (or Wal-Mart) would make a lot of money selling tons of vehicles at a huge discount until demand was surpassed and the market moved on to the next luxury auto in which case your sales slump as Joe's Automall stops selling your vehicles after a couple of years and instead decides to sell something else having already made their money.
That is just one example that I can think of off of the top of my head.
I hate the 3D - it gives me motion sickness. If they would have put the game dynamics of Civ IV into an expansion pack for Civ III I'd probably love it. And BTW I have tried every possible options combination in Civ IV to make it playable for me. I even download patches to see if they make anything better - more playable for myself.
Perhaps I do need a shrink, what is so bad about Civ III? I think it's the greatest game of all time.
Other than all being Xbox360s, what else do they all have in common? Perhaps they all came from the same retailer which has a stockboy that liked to drop-kick the Xboxes? Or, perhaps, he has some seriously bad karma.
Can a video/computer game jump the shark? As a fan of Civilization all the way back to the first I was disappointed in the 3D version of Civilization IV and now this? I still play Civ III all the time. I guess I'm just old school and will hope for mod packs to the old games to keep advancing the game instead of shrink wrapped options.
I can see this now, similar to police cars having cameras mounted in them, new cars begin to offer mounted cameras as optional equipment. Perhaps this would be more useful than a DVD player in the backseat.
This reminds me of the episode of The Office (U.S.) where Dwight and Jim go on a sales call. Jim is working on making the sale while Dwight calls up the support line for their competitor and lands in an automated system. Meanwhile Jim calls up Dunder-Mifflin and gets Pam immediately.
Of course this is just fiction and Dunder-Mifflin is quite the screwed up company (why we love it so much) but they have one thing right - human contact on the phones.
I have no links to this (too lazy) but I have read/heard/saw on TV that it's cheaper/easier to get the gold and other metals out of old electronics than to mine. I have no idea how much the metal in a typical PC would be worth but perhaps enough to help cover the shipping costs back to Dell or wherever Dell is having them shipped?
The point that I'm making is that it really doesn't (maybe) cost Dell anything, all things considered, to recycle these PCs.
Someone earlier pointed out urine spray on the walls. I can say that I have actually encountered these strategically "decorated" toilets in which the seat will only stay up for a short time. Here I am in mid-piss when all of the sudden the damn seat starts to fall. Once in mid-piss it's hard to turn off the water works so quickly so in a fraction of a second you have to decide to piss on the seat or redirect to the walls. I remember as a little kid being short enough that I had to redirect or have "stuff" hit by a falling seat, thus spraying the walls.
This has caused more arguments for me than just the whole seat up or down argument as it is practically an evil trap perpetrated on men by women that want the seat left down.
My story is not directly about a janitor but a maintenance crew that didn't even have direct access to the data room. They didn't need it to bring the system down.
As I remember it the UPS for one of our main servers was aging and needed replacement. It was not 100% reliable. One day before it could be replaced the maintenance crew were performing scheduled testing/maintenance of our generator.
There must have been a split second delay with the UPS when building power was switched to or back from generator power and one of our servers went down hard. It just so happened that we were in the middle of processing payroll. Hey, it doesn't get any more mission critical than processing payroll, right?
From then on the maintenance department had to get an okay from I.T. before testing the generator. We pretty much let them as long as payroll wasn't processing or it was between payroll saves and it was a "good time".
Funny, but true. If some people don't like the "violence" that's happening in SL then they could just become virtual police and investigate or she could just hire another SL player to teach the guy a lesson. Don't waste my tax money on investigating "crimes" in games.
I disagree. Wal-Mart has similar and sometimes exactly the same product in slightly different packaging (size) so as not have to compete as aggressively as you might think. I actually worked at a Hypermart (one of the first Wal-Mart + grocery stores) in their bakery department. The local grocery stores had 7" and 9" pies. We had 8" pies. When the competitors advertised their pies as on sale customers would want us to match the prices. Wal-Mart will always match a competitor's advertised price on the exact same product. Ours were not exactly the same as the size was slightly different.
It's the same in other departments. I've seen digital cameras nearly identical to the models that Best Buy, etc. have but be a slightly different model with (or without) one of the lesser needed features. This is designed to maximize profits by not having to match competitor's advertised prices.
I'd be surprised if Wal-Mart doesn't use software to help determine what price to charge for a very similar product.
Plus, Wal-Mart uses psychological pricing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing to create the perception of extreme value (for example charging an odd price of $19.87 instead of $19.99). Who's to know that they don't run their standard margin on a product, come up with a price of $19.49 then "round up" or maximize profits by repricing to $19.87? It still appears as a price decrease when it may or may not be.
As someone that quit IT to go into retail I will say that price optimization will benefit retailers looking for your business more than other types of consumers.
A specialty shop with unique products can just slap a large margin on a product as long as the price is fairly well justified and do fine, but when catering to a clientèle working with higher volumes, low margins and aggressively price conscious consumers then wringing every last possible penny out of them works.
Everyone knows that by and large in the U.S. that Wal-Mart is the price discount king. And even if you are really watching prices and comparing a consumer will still believe that they are getting the best deal at Wal-Mart. But I know that a significant number of their products are name brands packaged into their own unique size. Of course at Sam's Club things have to be bought in bulk for a discount but comparing product X at Wal-Mart in a 13oz size verses the same product X at a local competitor in a 20oz size can appear to be the exact same product for significantly less than a competitor although the price per ounce is a better deal at the competitor.
I sell pet food and I'll say that Ol' Roy is one of the cheapest priced pet foods per bag. Sure there are some others cheaper per bag at feed stores which may or may not be a better deal. I know some feed stores that use loss leaders to beat Ol' Roy. But, when comparing Ol' Roy to premium pet food the price per feeding will beat Ol' Roy most every time. So, buying a $15 bag of feed per week is more expensive than buying a $26 bag of feed per month.
Yes, I've used AIX. I won't disagree with you about it blowing chunks although I believe that is relative to what you might be used to. I learned 'nix on AIX while simultaneously using Linux at home. I learned right away that the two are not as interchangeable as one might think/hope.
When the Linux only guys would occasionally get on the AIX machines they would scare the crap out of me. And that's one reason why I find it odd to actually use Linux on pSeries. I understand that a pSeries would probably be carved up into Linux partitions.
Where I used to work we mainly bought pSeries/AIX machines because that was the preferred platform for the application we were wanting to run. Are there any such applications that are supported for the pSeries/Linux platform? I personally have not heard of any. Perhaps a LAMP setup but in that scenario I personally wouldn't opt for a pSeries platform unless, maybe it was an IBM only shop. I'd still opt for IBM's Intel based solution (probably still called xSeries).
FFIW we ran Windows on the iSeries. Of course it wasn't running on a POWER processor. The iSeries had what they called an IXS (Integrated xSeries Server) which was basically a daughter card with an Intel processor on it. I'm not sure if you can get one of those cards in a pSeries or not but the xSeries (or whatever they call them now) would be the way I would want to run Linux on IBM hardware.
I'll buy what you said about IBM wanting customers to be able to run any OS on any of their hardware. I just think it's odd to run it as advertised in TFA.
Maybe it's just me but I see it being ran that way only because some pSeries sales rep pushed that configuration on a PHB.
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Me, I am against the ruling. There is no reason ever to have a price floor. If you can't compete with Walmart, then find another business.
How about this hypothetical: Let's say you are a manufacturer and create very high end, luxury automobiles. They normally sell from $500,000 - $1,000,000 each. C'mon, no car costs that much money to produce but you sell enough to make some money, stay in business, etc. Of course there is R&D but divided out over the few hundred cars that you sell that is fine and dandy.Let's say some large retailer (Wal-Mart or Joe's Automall) decides to order 2 or 3 times as many that you normally produce and wishes to have the R&D split out drastically reducing the cost per vehicle so that they can sell the $1,000,000 models for under $200,000. I guess they they should be able to do that, right?
Wrong, you want to produce luxury autos and status is what people are paying for (exclusive limited run of vehicles) so, you can set a bottom floor on prices (perhaps $300,000 - $850,000) to protect your brand and market under this new ruling.
Of course Joe's Automall (or Wal-Mart) would make a lot of money selling tons of vehicles at a huge discount until demand was surpassed and the market moved on to the next luxury auto in which case your sales slump as Joe's Automall stops selling your vehicles after a couple of years and instead decides to sell something else having already made their money.
That is just one example that I can think of off of the top of my head.
I hate the 3D - it gives me motion sickness. If they would have put the game dynamics of Civ IV into an expansion pack for Civ III I'd probably love it. And BTW I have tried every possible options combination in Civ IV to make it playable for me. I even download patches to see if they make anything better - more playable for myself. Perhaps I do need a shrink, what is so bad about Civ III? I think it's the greatest game of all time.
Other than all being Xbox360s, what else do they all have in common? Perhaps they all came from the same retailer which has a stockboy that liked to drop-kick the Xboxes? Or, perhaps, he has some seriously bad karma.
...but does it run Linux?
Can a video/computer game jump the shark? As a fan of Civilization all the way back to the first I was disappointed in the 3D version of Civilization IV and now this? I still play Civ III all the time. I guess I'm just old school and will hope for mod packs to the old games to keep advancing the game instead of shrink wrapped options.
I'm sure IBM would love to sell you one.
I can see this now, similar to police cars having cameras mounted in them, new cars begin to offer mounted cameras as optional equipment. Perhaps this would be more useful than a DVD player in the backseat.
This reminds me of the episode of The Office (U.S.) where Dwight and Jim go on a sales call. Jim is working on making the sale while Dwight calls up the support line for their competitor and lands in an automated system. Meanwhile Jim calls up Dunder-Mifflin and gets Pam immediately.
Of course this is just fiction and Dunder-Mifflin is quite the screwed up company (why we love it so much) but they have one thing right - human contact on the phones.
I have no links to this (too lazy) but I have read/heard/saw on TV that it's cheaper/easier to get the gold and other metals out of old electronics than to mine. I have no idea how much the metal in a typical PC would be worth but perhaps enough to help cover the shipping costs back to Dell or wherever Dell is having them shipped?
The point that I'm making is that it really doesn't (maybe) cost Dell anything, all things considered, to recycle these PCs.
Screw that! I'm not connecting my brain to the company network.
Someone earlier pointed out urine spray on the walls. I can say that I have actually encountered these strategically "decorated" toilets in which the seat will only stay up for a short time. Here I am in mid-piss when all of the sudden the damn seat starts to fall. Once in mid-piss it's hard to turn off the water works so quickly so in a fraction of a second you have to decide to piss on the seat or redirect to the walls. I remember as a little kid being short enough that I had to redirect or have "stuff" hit by a falling seat, thus spraying the walls.
This has caused more arguments for me than just the whole seat up or down argument as it is practically an evil trap perpetrated on men by women that want the seat left down.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these.
Blame the editors. I cut and pasted. And no, I didn't RTFA.
In other news... enrollment drops at the University of Ohio.
It's the electronic equivalent of passing notes.
My story is not directly about a janitor but a maintenance crew that didn't even have direct access to the data room. They didn't need it to bring the system down.
As I remember it the UPS for one of our main servers was aging and needed replacement. It was not 100% reliable. One day before it could be replaced the maintenance crew were performing scheduled testing/maintenance of our generator.
There must have been a split second delay with the UPS when building power was switched to or back from generator power and one of our servers went down hard. It just so happened that we were in the middle of processing payroll. Hey, it doesn't get any more mission critical than processing payroll, right?
From then on the maintenance department had to get an okay from I.T. before testing the generator. We pretty much let them as long as payroll wasn't processing or it was between payroll saves and it was a "good time".
Funny, but true. If some people don't like the "violence" that's happening in SL then they could just become virtual police and investigate or she could just hire another SL player to teach the guy a lesson. Don't waste my tax money on investigating "crimes" in games.
I disagree. Wal-Mart has similar and sometimes exactly the same product in slightly different packaging (size) so as not have to compete as aggressively as you might think. I actually worked at a Hypermart (one of the first Wal-Mart + grocery stores) in their bakery department. The local grocery stores had 7" and 9" pies. We had 8" pies. When the competitors advertised their pies as on sale customers would want us to match the prices. Wal-Mart will always match a competitor's advertised price on the exact same product. Ours were not exactly the same as the size was slightly different.
g to create the perception of extreme value (for example charging an odd price of $19.87 instead of $19.99). Who's to know that they don't run their standard margin on a product, come up with a price of $19.49 then "round up" or maximize profits by repricing to $19.87? It still appears as a price decrease when it may or may not be.
It's the same in other departments. I've seen digital cameras nearly identical to the models that Best Buy, etc. have but be a slightly different model with (or without) one of the lesser needed features. This is designed to maximize profits by not having to match competitor's advertised prices.
I'd be surprised if Wal-Mart doesn't use software to help determine what price to charge for a very similar product.
Plus, Wal-Mart uses psychological pricing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricin
As someone that quit IT to go into retail I will say that price optimization will benefit retailers looking for your business more than other types of consumers.
A specialty shop with unique products can just slap a large margin on a product as long as the price is fairly well justified and do fine, but when catering to a clientèle working with higher volumes, low margins and aggressively price conscious consumers then wringing every last possible penny out of them works.
Everyone knows that by and large in the U.S. that Wal-Mart is the price discount king. And even if you are really watching prices and comparing a consumer will still believe that they are getting the best deal at Wal-Mart. But I know that a significant number of their products are name brands packaged into their own unique size. Of course at Sam's Club things have to be bought in bulk for a discount but comparing product X at Wal-Mart in a 13oz size verses the same product X at a local competitor in a 20oz size can appear to be the exact same product for significantly less than a competitor although the price per ounce is a better deal at the competitor.
I sell pet food and I'll say that Ol' Roy is one of the cheapest priced pet foods per bag. Sure there are some others cheaper per bag at feed stores which may or may not be a better deal. I know some feed stores that use loss leaders to beat Ol' Roy. But, when comparing Ol' Roy to premium pet food the price per feeding will beat Ol' Roy most every time. So, buying a $15 bag of feed per week is more expensive than buying a $26 bag of feed per month.
Yes, I've used AIX. I won't disagree with you about it blowing chunks although I believe that is relative to what you might be used to. I learned 'nix on AIX while simultaneously using Linux at home. I learned right away that the two are not as interchangeable as one might think/hope.
When the Linux only guys would occasionally get on the AIX machines they would scare the crap out of me. And that's one reason why I find it odd to actually use Linux on pSeries. I understand that a pSeries would probably be carved up into Linux partitions.
Where I used to work we mainly bought pSeries/AIX machines because that was the preferred platform for the application we were wanting to run. Are there any such applications that are supported for the pSeries/Linux platform? I personally have not heard of any. Perhaps a LAMP setup but in that scenario I personally wouldn't opt for a pSeries platform unless, maybe it was an IBM only shop. I'd still opt for IBM's Intel based solution (probably still called xSeries).
FFIW we ran Windows on the iSeries. Of course it wasn't running on a POWER processor. The iSeries had what they called an IXS (Integrated xSeries Server) which was basically a daughter card with an Intel processor on it. I'm not sure if you can get one of those cards in a pSeries or not but the xSeries (or whatever they call them now) would be the way I would want to run Linux on IBM hardware.
I'll buy what you said about IBM wanting customers to be able to run any OS on any of their hardware. I just think it's odd to run it as advertised in TFA.
Maybe it's just me but I see it being ran that way only because some pSeries sales rep pushed that configuration on a PHB.
I never understood the push for Linux on iSeries or pSeries. To me, if you want 'nix on pSeries just run AIX.
So, bring poppy seed bagels to the next interview to share with other prospective employees. :-)