darkonc
join:2003-07-14
Vancouver, BC
| reply to gc444
Re: Total BS!
said by gc444  :With as many people that knew about this I knew I had little chance at getting one, but perhaps they should look at other ways to sell this stuff so that more people will at least get a shot at it. Not being able to pull up the page means you have no chance, at least with the lottery you have just as good of a chance to win as everybody else. I.E. one in a Million (or more) -- You actually had a better chance getting the X-Box than winning the lottery. The long wait was simply your version of 'getting the last 4 numbers wrong'. The people who got the X-Box were the people who actually managed to get the packet timinhgs that allowed them to complete the transaction in the first 28 seconds that it wasn't sold out.
If your connections took longer than that, then you didn't win the X-box lottery. |
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batterup
I Can Not Tell A Lie.
Premium
join:2003-02-06
Netcong, NJ
clubs:
 ·Verizon Online DSL
1 edit | reply to emptywig
said by emptywig : Do these people know what the internet is? Yes I know what he Internet is; TUBES, massive massive TUBES, sticky massive TUBES.
With *Net-Neutrality* Amazon, nor anyone else, will ever be able to avoid a situation like this. With *Net-Neutrality* Amazon, nor anyone else, will be able to buy a fast non-sticky TUBE. |
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batterup
I Can Not Tell A Lie.
Premium
join:2003-02-06
Netcong, NJ
clubs:
·Verizon Online DSL
| reply to ChrisAdan650
Listen, this is the fact Jack, business 101. A retailer wants a 50% markup at retail. Wall-mart does not pay the same price wholesale as the boutique at the mall. Wall-mart has its own distribution chain that not many retailers can compete with. How many boutiques have a fleet of eighteen wheelers?
Now it is only speculation what a particular retailer paid wholesale for a particular item at a particular time in a particular situation. No one in the world knows the answer to that except that particular retailer. |
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emptywig
Huh? What?
Premium
join:2002-08-05
Pasadena, TX
| reply to jakerome
YES! Thank you Jakerome! Common sense and basic mathematics education come to the rescue!
I just roll on the floor holding my gut when people whine "There's no way they sold all of those in 2-3 minutes." Do these people know what the internet is? And that millions of people use it?
--
Sometimes a paradox is just a paradox |
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emptywig
Huh? What?
Premium
join:2002-08-05
Pasadena, TX
| reply to batterup
Most of the computer hardware industry DOES survive on such razor-thin margins. They make up for it in volume. Same with companies like Sam's Club and Costco.
Anyone who sells anything that is considered a commodity deals with tiny margins like 7% or sometimes less. And they CAN survive.
--
Sometimes a paradox is just a paradox |
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Daas
@videotron.ca | reply to Retailrefugee
High end electronics has margins you cannot think about... When I'm talking high-end, I'm talking about McIntosh amps, Wilson speakers or Ronco projectors... these articles tend to have a pretty big margin (over 70%)... |
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jakerome
join:2003-03-09
Manhattan Beach, CA
| reply to ChrisAdan650
Not BS. There were probably 10 million people trying to get this deal. They were selling 1000 systems. You probably had a 1-in-10,000 chance of being able to buy one of the cheap XBoxes.
Honestly, the math is this simple: whether or not the site went down is irrelevant. They were selling a fixed number of systems. If the site responded perfectly, you had a 1-in-10,000 chance. If the site was sluggish or down for most people, you still had a 1-in-10,000 chance. Honestly, the math isn't even hard. |
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mr3xcellent
@swbell.net
| reply to anonEmouse
You guys need to compare apples to apples... The profit in a dig. camera is nothing like a game system. I worked at Circuit City for three years. Their cost on the original XBOX1 was $304... they literally lost money on every one of them they sold. (Keep in mind they included the cost of shipping the item to the store in their cost)
It's the games and accessories that have a margin in them, and that's where you'll find difference in prices. It's annoying watching you guys argue over the profit in the console when there really isn't any. |
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Devistater
join:2004-02-13
Clovis, CA | reply to InTheKnow
Gotta love how people will make up things like uncles to try and prove thier "facts" |
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Retailrefugee
@cableone.net
1 edit | reply to batterup
High end electronics (ESPECIALLY new game consoles) have a very poor margin. The money is in the accessories and games. Why do you think a lot of stores are only selling "bundles"? |
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InTheKnow
@comcast.net
| reply to Ubu
said by Ubu :
My uncle works at Xbox and the employee discount is cost + 10% [of retail] and bought one for him and myself for about $130. The cost of it is $100. I don't think Amazon lost anything - just sold it for cost. Microsoft employees do not get discounts on XBox 360 consoles. Either your uncle doesn't exist, or he is lying to you. |
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TCPguy
@rogers.com
| reply to Crazy Hacker
Re: Tech Info
The response goes out on the same port (80), not some other port that the server "has to open".
TCP connections are defined by source ip, source port, destination ip, destination port. If any single one of those changes, it's a different connection. For web sites, the "destination" is the server, and your pc is the "source". If the server changes the port it sends the response on, the "destination port" changes, making it a different connection, so your pc has no way of knowing it's the response for the request it sent to port 80.
The TCP stack on the server has a maximum number of connections it can queue up; these are connections that are attempting to connect, but the server software hasn't accepted yet. When this limit is reached, then your pc "cannot connect" and it seems like the website is down.
Having a server farm lets the website answer more connections faster, but they are ALL going to (and responses coming from) the same port (80). |
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phattieg
join:2001-04-29
Winter Park, FL
 ·Verizon Wireless B..
·Sprint Mobile Broa..
| reply to ChrisAdan650
Re: Total BS!
Well, maybe if you would have "spoofed" the URL with HTTPS, it would have worked, like it did for me, but I didn't want to buy it, I just wanted to see how busy the site was...
--
SIPPhone/Gizmo # 17476200648 / PIMPNET Chatline / Ran by Asterisk & Slackware 10.1. |
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hubb
@uga.edu |  reply to batterup
 groceries sit on an average of 2.8% markup per item. |
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Robocoastie
@rr.com
| reply to batterup
as Devistater points out that's not true on computer products. Computer sales is a losing business in fact ever since the advent of the "cheap pc" type products in the late 90s. Profit in computer sales now comes from extended warrenty, service contracts and "upgrades" which is why salesmen in compusa push those so much. |
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Ubu
@rr.com | reply to Devistater
My uncle works at Xbox and the employee discount is cost + 10% [of retail] and bought one for him and myself for about $130. The cost of it is $100. I don't think Amazon lost anything - just sold it for cost. |
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jZero
@rit.edu | reply to batterup
No business in the world can stay in business on a markup of 7%. Perhaps, but there are some that not only stay in business but thrive on markups of only 14-15% (corporate policy, see Costco). |
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anonEmouse
@comcast.net
| reply to Devistater
Here's a concrete example that took me just a few seconds to find, if you click on the digital camera category. At the top you'll see an olympus SP-320 camera. That site claims the MSRP is $400. But if you google for olympus SP-320 MSRP, you'll see a number of sites such as this one:
»www.dcresource.com/reviews/camer···?cam=814
That show the MSRP is actually $300.
In fact here's a preview of the camera before it was released which shows the same MSRP of $300 (just in case you want to claim that its been lowered over time since the camera's release)
»www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/S···320A.HTM
$300 is NOT the MSRP price for the Olympus SP-320. It is the "Estimated Street Price" (ESP, sometimes alternately known as ERP for Estimated Retail Price):
»www.imaging-resource.com/NEWS/11···769.html
Products very seldom sell for their MSRP prices. MSRP is simply a price far in excess of the real retail price, allowing retailers to claim they're selling at a "30% discount" (or whatever) rather than admitting they're selling at the exact same price everybody else is.
Another common one is MAP, or Minimum Advertised Price, where authorised dealers are barred from publishing a price below a certain figure in their advertisements or promotional materials, and usually they're also barred from revealing the price on a website before capture of a shopper's identity / adding the item to a shopping cart / whatever. This one exists solely to prop up prices from retailers who are overcharging for a product by preventing the competition from advertising their lower price. |
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Crazy Hacker
@comcast.net
| reply to Harik
Re: Tech Info
said by Harik :said by knightmb :For those that are curious, the most ports you can have open is 65,535 on a connection, so if more than (minus everything else below 1024 that the OS will need for various reasons) that many people are clicking to begin with, the server, no matter how beefy it is simply can't get the request because of this hard limit. WOW. Just WOW. That's utterly and totally incorrect. Your win32 machine _DOES_ have a hard limit of 64511 (or less) outgoing connections, because they each use one of the available ports. But on the server side, each of them connects to the same port (80). The server's "hard" limit is 281.4 trillion connections (32 bits IP, 16 bits port). That's per service port. Obviously no machine can support that, if there were even a way to get that many machines to connect at once. Actually, the server listens on port 80 and can accept the hard limit, but has to open a response port to talk back to the client, and that's where the real limitation comes in. Even though the port is in use for a short period before closing, most OS's don't allow port re-use for 60 seconds (this can be tweaked on Unix/Linux, but I'm not sure about Windows). So in reality, one server can only have 64k concurrent connections. Of course, for huge sites like Amazon, this is handled by geographic load balancing, so even the load balancer clusters, are load balanced across the world. |
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someonehere
@charter.com | reply to batterup
Re: Total BS!
Not true. You're average grocery store stays in business on a margin of 1-2%. Only thing is, a company like Stop and Shop does $40billion in sales a year. You do the math. It's all about volume. |
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