SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Maybe some of have already seen this, but I hadn't seen it until it bit me in the ass today. Amazon is listing some of its standard products as Prime only, meaning only Prime members are allowed to buy it. Prime is an Amazon subscription service that gives you free 2-day shipping (to your local post office, not to your door), streaming services, and a bunch of other 'benefits'. They have gone to great lengths to push this $99 a year service on people, including delaying normal shipments and preventing you from buying what you want. I no longer qualify to reorder a SSD I bought last week since I'm not willing to become a member (nor can I try the 30 trial as I did that back when Prime was new). All that SSD research time wasted.
We were worried about net neutrality. It seems in the future we'll have to worry about subscribing to every store we want to do business with just to have the privilege of buying from them. I'll bet money within a couple years you won't qualify for sales like Cyber Monday unless you're a subscriber. I can easily see that spreading to every store: "Pay $10 at the door for big savings on all our in-store, on sale items." Stores used to give you discounts for going to them, now you'll have to pay for the honor of shopping there.
(Score: 5, Informative) by black6host on Sunday November 13 2016, @11:11PM
Prime 2-day shipping has always been to my door. Not the post office. And I question your appraisal of your SSD research as wasted. If you're in the market for an SSD then you research them no matter where you buy them from.
With respect to "exclusive" items the market will respond to demand. If I have to pay extra to buy from A and the cost to buy from B is lower as a result then I'm going to buy from B.
Anyway, perhaps I misunderstood. That can happen. But I can share my experience and my thoughts.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 14 2016, @12:09AM
Prime 2-day shipping has always been to my door. Not the post office.
Same here, seven days a week. I often have free 1-day shipping as an option, and I've even had free same-day delivery (including on Sat & Sun).
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 14 2016, @02:21AM
My Amazon Visa 3% cash rebate for Amazon purchases and 1% everywhere else pays off prime membership after only about 3 months use. I always pay the full balance each month, so there's never any finance charge. I use it for everything... bills, groceries, gas, shopping, It adds up quickly.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 14 2016, @12:31AM
Well - there is "research" and there is "research". When I decided to build a RAID, I really didn't know where to start. So, I started looking at all the abbreviations, what the model numbers actually meant, how fast, how reliable, blah, blah, blah. I didn't "research" the price until I had narrowed my choices down to two or three models. Only then did I do any price shopping. And - Amazon wasn't even in the running. I found like three or four different vendors who beat Amazon by 10% or more.
Some people would just believe the marketing hype, "This is the fastest, bestes on the market people!" then research the price. In AC's case, Amazon may have offered the best price, or, more likely, AC has permitted targeted marketing schemes to send him back to Amazon again and again.
Amazon is NOT the best price around, or at least not very often.
How many people realize that when they click on a product from Amazon, they may or may not see the same price that I see? Targeted marketing. If Amazon has reason to believe that you have more dollars than sense, they'll show you a price three times as high as the price they show me. In my case, Amazon seems to have overestimated my income. I just don't have money to throw away on their stuff. And, I certainly don't want to pay a hundred dollars a year for the privilege of being fleeced!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 14 2016, @03:53AM
> How many people realize that when they click on a product from Amazon, they may or may not see the same price that I see? Targeted marketing. ...
I may have discovered another variant of this? I have never purchased from Amazon[*] but recently I bought some window insulation film from an eBay seller. It was a good price, with free shipping, came in two days. When it arrived there was Amazon paperwork inside--it looks like this eBay seller was using Amazon for fulfillment?
If I wanted to feel paranoid, I'd say that Amazon saw me coming...and to snag me as a customer they targeted me without exposing the Amazon brand...
* Long story. Many years ago when Amazon was mostly a bookseller, our small, technical book publisher refused to meet the Amazon price discount demand. As retribution, Amazon listed our book as "out of print". Shortly after, I started getting emails from prospective customers, "Do you have any copies left?" The book was never out of print... Amazon has been hell on small specialty book publishers and I'm unlikely to ever buy from them knowingly.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday November 14 2016, @07:10PM
You've discovered "arbitrage". You just paid a higher price to some guy on Ebay who didn't even have the product, so he could turn around and buy it from an Amazon seller (or Amazon itself) at a lower price, and pocket the difference. Ebay is chock full of sellers like this.
You really have to do your research when buying either on Amazon or Ebay. The same thing exists on Amazon; I've seen sellers on Amazon selling an automatic litter box for 3-4x the manufacturer's price, because the manufacturer only sells direct; they're hoping some idiot will really pay $1600 for something they can get straight from the manufacturer for $450. Enough people probably fall for it to make it worth it.
(Score: 1) by Ramze on Monday November 14 2016, @05:31AM
Don't mean to thread-jack, but as someone who was recently looking into RAID myself, thought you might like my 2 cents. Unless you're looking to spend a few thousand on a 8 drive rack or higher or really need a speed boost from RAID 1 mirroring, you're better off with a single main drive and an identical backup drive price-wise and headache-wise.
I went with WD's external 8 TB mybook -- two of them. They typically come with WD Red (RAID approved) drives inside them -- for cheaper than you could buy the WD Red drives individually. I'm going to run one on my computer and share out the identical drive on another machine that will pull weekly changes via software. This solution was cheaper than the WD 2-bay RAID 1 private cloud, and there's no single point of failure like the RAID controller. It also holds nearly as much as the RAID 10 4-bay solutions that cost twice as much. Generally, the larger the drive, the faster the I/O... and with RAID setups, there's often controller overhead, proprietary encryption/formatting, and lots of software hiccups with sharing drives over the network -- not to mention many RAIDs are limited to 100 mbps ethernet cards and have smaller, slower drives inside them. A USB 3.0 external drive will usually beat a snap server on I/O -- especially if you turned on RAID 5 or RAID 6. They're so computation-heavy, a file copy could take all day.
Some software can configure JBOD with internal mirroring/striping also -- I think Windows 10 can do it, but don't know if I'd recommend it. That would make JBOD sort-of like a RAID if it can heal when a drive fails.
My dream solution would be a 8 or 10 cartridge tower full of 8TB drives running RAID 6... but that cost more than my car. RAIDs usually aren't worth the trouble unless you're running a business and need the up-time.
TL;DR, a good drive and a backup can be a cheaper solution to a RAID 1 if uptime isn't important.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 14 2016, @02:40PM
I had a few reasons for wanting a RAID. The one reason that finally pushed me into making the investment was, I no longer had enough connections for my JBOD. I have disks from back in the day when a gigabyte was a HUGE hard drive. I have boxes of hard drives. I needed to consolidate all that stuff. Sort through all the data. kinda organize it, and put it in one place. I started to do that once, but quickly ran out of space on a 500 gig drive. That did help me to get rid of a few of the smaller hard drives, but I still had a bunch.
So - I ordered four 2 Tb drives, built the software RAID, and started plugging and unplugging drives to move data. All my stuff has been saved into one partition of 1.5 Tb, and I've put another 2Tb partition on the network for the wife to save all her pirated movies and stuff to.
Even on my SuperMicro board, there are only six SATA channels, and two IDE channels. A JBOD can use those all up, and still leave you short of room. Shutting down the system to plug in a different disk, or purchasing a bunch of external hot-pluggable boxes both seemed pretty silly to me. The RAID has solved all my problems with regard to a massive JBOD.
Parenthetically, I remember the day that I went shopping for a larger hard drive for an Intel 386 sx machine. I stumbled across a gigabyte drive, and got all excited. Thought this would hold everything I would ever want to save. I was so disappointed when I learned that my hardware and OS would fail to read that monstrous hard drive. All these years later, I'm amused that we thought one gig was big.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday November 14 2016, @02:15PM
there is "research" and there is "research".
My experience is Amazon rocks for mass consumer stuff like kitchen gadgets or their old specialty of books, but they're not even seriously in the running for engineering stuff.
Technically they try to sell hardware and machine tool parts, if you like paying $30 with "free shipping" for an endmill you can get at MSC or the other suppliers for like $13. Or you can buy a 6-32 x 1 inch machine screw if you think Home Depot's already insane prices are too low. It is convenient, however, if you just need four screws to complete a project and I could enter a special order somewhere else or basically throw away $2 and get it all from Amazon in one order...
Amazon is awful for electronic components, every reseller has awful prices and its unsearchable compared to Digikey or Mouser (or even Jameco). I have an order from Digikey incoming today in fact, its just too easy to search for parts there. Nice parametric search UI.
For radio control parts or general model supply stuff, again, they're as bad or worse than ordering from a hobby store, and direct from a larger hobby supplier is cheaper. You can pay more for a smaller selection at amazon or you can just go directly to hobbyking especially when some stuff on amazon is being sold by hobbyking to begin with. I don't know why hobbyking in particular only sells like 25% of their selection on amazon, which is annoying when I need something in the set of 75% of stuff they don't sell on Amazon and strongly encourages me to skip amazon and order direct.
Something interesting to note over the years is honesty is becoming more important than price and UI. For example Digikey (or Mouser) website says they have 3 in stock of some obscure transistor or IC or whatever, you can in fact order those 3 and they'll arrive in two days. Amazon is mostly honest when they say only 7 in stock you can order a couple no problem and they arrive with only the rarest exception. Other online retailers ... well... everything is always in stock at certain suppliers and then after payment is complete for your order you get the dreaded "backordered for six months" form letter. And of course their website still says its in stock afterwards because they're sons of bitches and I'll never shop there again and I'll make sure to never mention their name in public other than to strongly disparage it.
Funny digikey fact everything they ship goes in an antistatic bag inside a plastic bag inside a box with a purchase order that mentions static sensitivity, even if you backordered a single connector or its merely a stainless steel screw.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 14 2016, @04:11PM
Shhhhh. Don't tell Amazon about this lack of stock in electronics and hobby goods...or next they will be buying Digikey (etc).
(Score: 2, Informative) by tekk on Monday November 14 2016, @04:56AM
That's my experience as well. They no longer advertise it, but if you open a support ticket for a shipment taking more than 2 days to your door they'll usually give you a free month of prime.