[geeks] FS: nVidia 7300GS, Athlon64 3200+

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Phil Stracchino <alaric at metrocast.net>
>Date: 2008/01/11 Fri PM 09:42:54 CST
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] FS: nVidia 7300GS, Athlon64 3200+

>Bill Bradford wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 11, 2008 at 10:13:54PM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>>> How do you bid? I've used sniping tools in the past - just enter a hard
>>> maximum bid, plus a couple dollars cushion and let it go!
>> 
>> I bid up to the maximum I could afford (with shipping, etc).  I don't like
>> using sniping tools (I do it the old fashioned way); plus I can only bid on
>> one radio at a time.  
>> 
>> I'm just mostly annoyed.  Spent the afternoon dealing with traffic, then
>> got home to find out I lost the auction for the R-70.  
>
>The thing that annoys me is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to 
>win anything that anyone else cares about on eBay *EXCEPT* by bid 
>sniping.  And I hate both bid sniping and those who practice it.  Back 
>when they first started, eBay used to prohibit and punish it, then at 
>some point they caved in.  They could SO easily have made the whole 
>issue moot simply by saying "No auction will end until there have been 
>no new bids submitted in ten minutes."  (And end prices, and their cut 
>thereof, would very likely have gone *up*.)

There was a web auction site that did just that, a long time ago, they let auctions run till the bidding ended. I found it annoying, as I wound up spending way too much time trying to buy something "of interest".

The issue was, the item would go to the person that had nothing better to do. While in the abstract it sounds great, the truth is eBay wouldn't scale to it's huge size today if the auctions were open ended (IMHO). It was a huge leap to get millions of people to trust bidding and auctions, and asking them to sit around and wait until everyone else exhausted their bidding would have been too great a barrier for most folks.

With a sniping tool (which I don't use, and haven't for about 3-4 years, IIRC) I won most of what I bid on, but there was no guarantee... I won if I knew the "real" value of something almost every time, though...

Lionel