[geeks] value of PIII PC servers

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 @ 14:44 -0400, Nadine said:

> On 6/15/06, Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:
> > I sometimes find really interesting things on ebay by searching for
> > everything ending immediately and below $50.  That's how I snagged my
> > SS5 years ago for $25, and the Ultra 1 for $10 a bit over a year ago.
> 
> Are you using some kind of automated search tool to do this, or only
> eBay's advanced search function?  

I have done both.

Most of the tools are for sniping of course, but some of them are pretty
good general auction tools.

Unfortunately, almost all of them are for Windows.

> I don't really see that kind of
> specificity available on eBay, so I was wondering if you had some
> other tool you use as a "proxy".

Have you taken a look at the advanced search functions?  There you can
narrow down your search quite far, even picking certain currencies,
geographic proximity, time left, number of bids, etc.

> I hate the fact that eBay is so blasted slow at times, so if other
> people have tools they use to help them with their eBay
> shopping/selling, I'd appreciate hearing about them.

Yes, ebay is slow, and also uses very inefficient HTML which puts a high
load on the browser.  Given some of their recent aquisitions, I refuse
to believe they cannot afford enough computing resources and bandwidth.
Unless, of course, they are terribly managed.

Quite a few functions are also broken.  The ones that bother me most:

	- quite a few searches for ebay users fail, no idea why
	- the results page frequently screwed up and the "Try this:" search
	  suggestion box at the top ends up over top of the first few lines
	  of search results.
	- when doing an advanced search, the user of certain options
	  frequently fails completely.  For example, ebay user mixed with
	  other options, and other combinations.  In the latter case, what
	  happens is some of your search criteria silently goes away.  The
	  search also cannot find items that have no bids, which I think is
	  pretty bloody stupid.  At least, I could not make it do this.

There are a few others.  I have reported several bugs to ebay, and in
every case they either denied it was a bug (and they most certainly
were), or refused to discuss it at all.  In some cases they tried to
spit failures as features.

But... they've killed off most of the other auction sites, so there you
go.

Anyway, I'm always trying new things, so if I find a tool that works
well, especially for UNIX, I'll try to remember and post it here. 

The only way to really get killer deals all the time is to spend a lot of
time, so I usually try to find ways to minimize it.

Sometimes though, there just is no better tool than patience.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["It's a damn poor mind that can only think
of one way to spell a word." -- Andrew Jackson]