I was more excited about the speakers. Except they didn’t work. Same exact problem as last time: the LCD that’s supposed to show volume/treble/bass didn’t work. I know what most of you are thinking: are you sure you set them up right?

I can tell you that I tried every possible setting on the thing (there aren’t that many). If anyone has any recommendation on a good set of 2.1 speakers suitable for a small home office, let me know.

I had to send them back today, because the LCD that’s supposed to show volume/treble/bass didn’t work. No lighty.

I had the option of getting an exchange or refund. However, it seems like Amazon’s exchange means you just buy a duplicate item and send back the defective one. It seemed like I’d be responsible for the shipping charges. The alternative, simply returning for a refund, meant that they’d pay shipping charges.

Returning was very easy: since I still had all the packaging and shipping box from the item, I printed out the UPS slip. put the RMA in the box, taped it up, and took it to a UPS store. At the same time, I ordered a new one, because I really want those speakers (provided they work).

The first set took a month to get here. This second set says it’ll ship on the 23rd. I’m really hoping that they’re not waiting for me to return the defective pair so they can just ship it back to me.

Wonder of wonders. I also found out today that a replacement for a defective 1 TB hitachi drive has been shipped today.

I need to remember around Christmas time that when I buy all this tech crap, I only end up sending a good chunk of it back mid-winter. From now on, I stick to online gambling.

Didn’t really care for the rest of the album, though.

Turns out, I’ve already bought it at B&N. OK. My fault. Should’ve checked first. Initially, B&N said they wouldn’t be able to refund my purchase because audio books aren’t refundable. I wrote an email explaining that I understand that they couldn’t refund digital media because it isn’t returnable; once you buy it, there’s no way they can stop you from listening to it. However, I already own this media, so there’s no point in stopping me from getting a refund.

Guess what? They were pretty reasonable. They explained it would be a one-time deal, but they’d refund it to me. I really like when corporations listen to their customers and act reasonably. I know that it’s up to me to check whether I have media already before buying it.* Kudos to B&N for being reasonable.

* This is something many other stores do for you: maintaining a record of your digital library. My guess is that B&N will grow this feature in the future. Right now, it seems to be the trade-off you make for B&N’s cheaper prices.

My understanding of the web site proceeded in stages:

1. It’s ebay
2. They’re losing money
3. You can game the system
4. It’s a gambling site

Caution: if you have a gambling, do not visit this site. Buy a lottery ticket instead. If you have an eBay problem, do not visit this site. Turn off your computer now if you are in both categories.

It’s e-Bay

Well, there are some major differences between Swoopo and eBay.

First, eBay doesn’t charge the bidder to place a bid. On Swoopo, you (as a bidder) need to buy bids ahead of time, at a rate of 60 cents per bid (this used to be $1 when they first started ,so apparently, they’re doing well).

Second, when you place a bid, you don’t pick the price. Swoopo increments the last offer by a fixed amount—a penny, 6 cents, 12, cents—that’s determined before the start of the auction.

Third, the only people selling things on Swoopo are Swoopo themselves. There’s no used stuff; it’s all new merchandise, and only the owners/operators of Swoopo are selling it.

Fourth, eBay (last I checked) had a defined time-limit on all their auctions. However, on Swoopo, every time someone places a bid, the auction gets extended—typically by 20 seconds, but we’ve seen it jump by minutes at a time. (In fact, one of the only reasons I didn’t place money on an auction at this point was that I couldn’t figure out how the auction time would get extended; seemed like there were no rules to the game.)

They’re losing money

While my co-worker and I were talking about the site, we missed the following ounce of gold going for $3.41:

Yup. That’s right. An ounce of gold is worth around $1100 and this guy bought it for $3.41 (plus whatever he paid for his bids). So, altogether, he got the gold for $78.41 – which means Swoopo made a loss of $1,120.59.

Seems like Swoopo would be losing money on transactions like these. And they are. Except they make it up on other transactions. Consider this purchase of gold for $203:

Since each bid increased the price by 1 cent, there were $203.13 = 20,313 bids placed. Each bid costs 60 cents, so Swoopo got $12,187.80 in revenue. The gold costs around $1100, so they netted around $11,000 on that auction. Note, however, that the person that won the auction still got a really good deal. He spent around $600 for $1,100 of gold.

You can game the system

So, how can you make sure that you win (and not someone else)? Well, you can wait until the other bidders have fueled the price higher and then just “swoop” in and place the final bid.

Except you can’t do that, because someone else can swoop your bid and keep the auction going.

Certainly, if there are fewer other bidders, your chances of winning the auction are better. Perhaps you can participate in auctions late at night, when people are asleep—or during the day, when people are working. Except the auctions run internationally, so there isn’t that much change in interest. (I checked this by visiting their UK site and verifying that the same items were presented in UK as in the US.)

There’s a bit of game theory here. It reminds me of the case that comes up where everyone is at a party and there are multiple conversations going on. One person (maybe saying something important or may be having trouble hearing) starts speaking a little louder. That causes the people around him to speak louder—and eventually everyone is yelling. Despite the fact that everyone could speak quietly and have the same (or better) ability.

Similarly, if all the bidders knew each other and could trust each other, the bidding could stop early. The final auction price would remain low, and people would place fewer bids (and each bid costs 60 cents). Of course, swoopo does a good job of not letting the bidders communicate. Plus, there’s a risk that everyone may say they won’t place the next bid, but someone might do it anyway.

The only time someone wins the auction is when all the other players say, “Someone keeps bidding on top of my bid. I’m wasting bids. I’m going to wait for someone else to place it and I’ll save my bids for a little later.” So, you basically need all the participants to have the same thought: “I’ll let someone else get this bid.”

That’s pretty low probability. It’s very similar to the lottery: everyone buys a ticket and fills the pot. Now, one of the tickets is going to win, but we don’t know whom. There’s another analogy: it’s gambling. Sure, the casino pays out every now and then, but most of the time, the house wins.

It’s gambling

So, in the end, I started to realize that this site was less about selling stuff and more about getting around gambling regulations. The key thing that determines whether you win is when all the bidders think the same thing (and don’t place a bid)—which is definitely as random as a deck of cards.

Postscript

A friend of mine came up with an interesting observation: the site allows you to put your bids toward the “purchase price” of the item at any time. So, if you’ve put in 100 bids on a $600 American Express gift card, then, you can buy it for $540 ($600 minus the $60 you spent on your bids). The site calls this “Swoop it now”. If that’s the case, you should always bid on things where the purchase price is a definite value. That way, you can always hop out of the auction and do the “swoop it now” to recoup the cost of your bids. Unfortunately, Swoopo has filled in this hole by only presenting defined-value items (gold, AmEx gift cards) as a bundle with packs of bids:

So, if you do “swoop it now”, you get more bids which are only worth something if you’re entering another auction. I have another theory behind this action: it causes people to mentally think, “Oh, I can bid at least 200 times and it’s essentially free.” And, if 10 people think this, Swoopo makes 9x the cost of the bids vouchers its bundling.

Great song. Great album.

Here’s what the same files look like under Firefox:

The HTML file I used to test this is:

The embedded SVG file is:

I’m basically trying to support MathML with SVG as a backup over at the circuit design site. I guess the 7% of visitors that use Chrome will have to deal.

Update 2010-1-3

I’m back to using Barnes & Noble. Every now and then, they have an ebook or MP3 audibook that’s way less than either eMusic or Audible. Also, I do know to look out for the WebLoyalty (etc) pitch, so it doesn’t bother me as much now.

Original Post

I’ve been pretty happy with Barnes & Noble as an alternative to Amazon. I just bought What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful and unfortunately found the following link to Webloyalty

Sigh. I have a hard time leaving Barnes & Noble; their discounts are good, but I’m afraid I might have to because of their affiliation with Webloyalty

I’ve been using Sprint’s 4G for almost a week. As I posted before, I didn’t particularly like their connection software popping up their start page every time I connected to their 4G network–especially since I had to connect several times on my train ride into the city. Don’t get me wrong, the Sprint SmartView software will auto-reconnect (although I’m still not sure how I got it to do so) in the background if your 4G signal gets dropped–except every time it does so, there’s the sprint start page again, completely interrupting your work.

I coworker had issues installing SmartView on his Windows 7 64-bit machine. (I’m running 64-bit Vista right now.) He read somewhere that ClearWire’s software will install on Windows 7. Since Sprint and ClearWire are the same 4G network (Sprint divested/invested in ClearWire), the software should work. So, I happily installed ClearWire’s software trying to “upgrade” from SmartView.

It didn’t work. What’s worse is that SmartView refuses to function. Even after a complete de-install/re-install. Even after deleting sections of the windows registry, and the Sprint sub-folder in my %APPDATA% folder. (For those of you who don’t know what registry and %APPDATA% are, be thankful, and just realize I was taking desperate measures to cope with broken software.)

As it turns out, one of our IT guys told us that the 32-bit version of Clear’s software seems to work with Sprint’s 4G network (meaning, it authenticates under a Sprint 4G account–Clear and Sprint have the same network). However, the 64-bit version doesn’t. That didn’t help my Win7-64 friend and I.

What did help immensely was this post at the sprint forums. This guy “manned up” and modified the Clear software so it’ll connect to the 4G network using a Sprint account:

And it worked for me! So, no more trying to get SmartView running again. This software is way better. It’s much smaller and less intrusive. Its default install automatically reconnects when the signal is dropped. It has more updated drivers, and it supports 64-bit Win7. It’ll connect using either the 4G or the 3G modems built into the U300 (which Clear also sells).

The lesson learned here is that Sprint is distracted by 4G. It’s not their main thing. They’re supporting a bunch of other devices, and they don’t invest as much in their SmartView software. However, 4G is all ClearWire does. It shows in their software’s usability.

Just an FYI: there are no guarantees to any of this working for you. Also, the buttons on the clear software “my account”, “my usage”, “my local” won’t work for me because I don’t have a clear account… but that might change.

ClearWire also supports the built-in Intel WiMax radio inside my Lenovo T400. So, I’m going to try out their service as an official subscriber. That means I give up connecting using 3G, but that’s not so bad. It’s almost worse to have the 3G backup, because your 4G connection will imminently drop, the software will connect you on 3G, and you’ll be stuck on 3G unless you manually reconnect to 4G. Also, the U300 works better with a proprietary Y cable (supplied by Sprint/Clear) that allows for more power; it’ll be nice to not have to worry about that cable.

Incidently: if you connect to Clear’s network (using Intel’s proset WiMax utility), you’ll get an offer for a 30-day free trial (until the end of the year)—which you won’t see on their home page or anywhere else. So, it pays to just try to connect and get the offer. You do have to agree that they get to send you emails during the 30-day trial period. I’ll post a follow-up with how ClearWire’s service looks (as an official subscriber), but for right now, I’m much more impressed with ClearWire than with Sprint.

That’s right: 5 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. Except that by the time I reached the next station, the 4G was disconnected. I can’t say that this is due to Sprint’s 4G network, due to their software, or if it’s due to my laptop. Regardless, it’s annoying. I do have a couple firmware updates to install, though. I tried doing it last night, but I’m not exactly sure how to (the button to update didn’t seem to do the job.)

Another thing that’s annoying? After I reconnect, the Sprint Smartview software opens Sprint’s web site in my browser. This is mildly annoying when I have firefox up (it just adds another tab). However, it’s absolutely intolerable when I don’t, because I just want to get back to work, but instead, all of a sudden, firefox pops up with:

I’ve been looking for a way to stop SmarView from doing this, but I haven’t found it yet. Incidently, I had to reconnect twice while writing this post.

OK: make that 4 times. If anyone is wondering, I’m using the U300 (can’t tell if it’s Sierra Wireless or Franklin) modem. It supports both EV-DO and WiMax. It does not automatically hand over. I’ve also tried getting SmartView to auto-reconnect to WiMax, but that doesn’t work either. You have to manually reconnect when disconnected.