On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, Adrian Vickers wrote: This is a really good point. There has to be an objective value based on true scarcity (i.e. how many total units produced), not regional scarcity, and generally acknowledged historical and/or technical significance. eBay prices do not generally reflect objective value. I think Michael Nadeau's book made great strides towards this end, but refinement is still needed. To be sure, prices for old computers will still not settle in the near future. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *

On Fri, 25 Apr 2003, Doc Shipley wrote: Perhaps. But there has to be at least some generally acceptable standard by which people can use to trade fairly. We do not really have that right now. I can concur with that. Ok, perhaps "true" was too strong an adjective. But it is not impossible to give an educated estimate (based on good research) as to how many units are out there. I've just learned of possibly four more Apple-1's that I was not aware of before, which will take the total of known units in my personal registry to 32 (I still have to verify there is not overlap from what I already know). With significant machines produced in low numbers, such as the Apple-1 and PDP-8, it may not be all that impossible to estimate within a margin of error of +/-15% the total number of units out there. Once that number can be ascertained, a reliable "value" based on demand could be established, and trading can then be conducted on that basis of knowledge. Of course, there is still variation based on condition and accessories (peripherals, documentation, software, etc.) and that can also be objectively valued with more research. Wasn't someone just arguing in a message a short while ago that eBay has now opened up a global market and therefore increased demand to the same finite supply? Of course, this depends on whether or not you use eBay to market your wares. And then there's the issue of shipping charges, which adds to the overall "value" that a person will assign to something. If it can be had for $1 but costs $99 to ship, it could be considered to be worth just as much as someone who could pick it up locally and would be willing to pay $100. This assumes that the buyer is taking shipping into consideration when they put down their bid. But regional scarcity implies ignorance on the part of the buyer. You cannot always rely on this. And in a global market like collectable computers, you cannot completely rely on this anymore. I can't entirely agree. I'll pull up an old example. If people are regularly paying $10 for Apple //e's and then some uninformed buyer one day pays $500, are all Apple //e's suddenly worth $500? or some significant amount over $10 that is arrived at by averaging in the $500 sale? I say no, it's still only worth $10. Then what was it worth when it was new? Wasn't the "value" then also entirely emotional and subjective? -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *

Preface: I come at this from a slightly different viewpoint. My father was a manufacturer, as well as distributor of other firms' product. I literally grew up wheeling and dealing, and learning through loss of my allowance the difference between cost, value, and the expenses that lie between. My mother is a professor of business economics at a business college, and teaches at a nuts & bolts level. What's different is that they were also missionaries in Uganda and Kenya for several months each year while Mother was taking her Master's, and she used the Ugandan economy and the concept of "relative regional valuation" in her thesis. I absorbed a good bit of that, although not at any deep level. I've found eBay to be a very compressed, very accelerated microcosmic example of not only my mother's observations, but of general business principles of valuation and distribution. To quote the, uhm, well, anyway, to quote Richard Erlacher, "See below, plz." On Friday, April 25, 2003, at 02:14 PM, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: Here I think you're not recognizing the difference between value and cost. To mix our examples, the real _cost_ of a VAXstation 3100 in Austin - to me - is, say, $1 USD. To someone in Melbourne, I'm guessing the cost is much closer to $100 USD. Since I know there are persons in Australia who would like to have one, and they haven't contacted me to inquire about shipping arrangements, I can safely assume that the real _value_ in Australia doesn't approach the real _cost_. That's the condition of regional scarcity to which I referred. While my example isn't extreme enough to warrant shipping a container of VAXen, it does imply, rightly I think, that the Australian owner of a VAXstation 3100 could expect a selling price many times higher than I could expect. To you as buyer or to you as seller? As buyer, absolutely. If the thing was worth more than $10 to me as a buyer, and they had been selling at $10, I'd have already sated myself on $11 Apple //e's, so that spike would be irrelevant. :) As seller, it's more complicated. The answer would be "No, but yes." If I put an Apple //e on the newsgroup at a fixed price, I'd look at the low side of this config and condition, as indicated by eBay and any other references I can find to actual sales, add 25-50%, and settle for the best offer. If I have 100 //e's and I put them up at a Dutch auction, I would have to expect $8 or $9 each at best. Auctioned as a single lot, maybe $2 each or even less. If I have 100 units and I auction them singly, well presented, records of high price spikes would either be rare enough to not affect the average sale, or common enough to indicate that I may benefit from that mania. Sure. Its "value" was simply more widely acknowledged. Doc

On Fri, 25 Apr 2003, Hans B Pufal wrote: And again, I disagree, precisely because of the way that eBay auctions work, and the factors that can influence a final selling price. However, I will say that as time goes on, and using eBay becomes a way of life, the values will normalize somewhat, and I think we are seeing that with certain items now. As I mentioned previously, the relevance is in establishing a baseline value upon which two people can efficiently trade. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org * Old computing resources for business and academia at www.VintageTech.com *

This is something that the video game community has been grappling with for some time as well. More often than no however, the solution is to form some sort of official price guide (which this list should consider) based on a survey of Ebay prices. Ebay still presents a valuable resource, because it makes it much easyer to research selling prices of an item than calling all over and trying to keep track of sales without the net would be. Generally though, you want to report three prices in such a listing - a high, low, and average selling price for the item. I'm reminded of a story on the r.g.v.c. newsgroup of someone who came across someone like that at an indoor flea market. The seller was using it to justify their rediculously high price. The newgroup member had their laptop (equiped with cellular modem) with and proceeded to pull up an ebay auction for the item in question. He then began to showing it to people just outside the booth in question, in protest claiming the seller was of course a scam artist. The seller became irate, but security wouldn't do anything about it since the guy wasn't breaking any laws showing it to people. He also was not in the guy's booth area. The seller quickly closed down his booth and went home "for the day".

Make a nice pretty web page, but only put links to the files on the official web site. Keep the actual files on some other unrelated , unnamed site, and zip the files and give them meaningless file names. This way if somebody complains and the file site boots you off, just find another freeby file site and update the links.

There's also that small matter of $150,000 statutory damages for willful infringement per copyrighted work ($30,000 per work for non-willful) under the copyright statute.

On Thu, 2003-04-24 at 11:58, James Rice wrote: I have mixed feelings about sniping. I've lost a number of bids to "snipers". The thing that bugs me about it is that for items I care about, I don't have an opportunity to respond to the snipe. Most of the bids I've lost due to sniping have been where I was the original bidder and there were no other bidders until the snipe. I think this is unfair to not only me, but the seller as well. For example I may have put in a max bid on something for $30. An esnipe comes in for $31. Upon seeing that I may have re-assed my bid and bid it to $50. But because esnipes happen in the last few seconds, I can't respond and the seller potentially looses additional funds for the item. But in the end, if I wanted really badly, I would have bid more. So it's a tough call. I don't have a problem with e-bay. Sometimes people get into a feeding frenzy over an item which drives the price on an item way up. I look for items on e-bay that I either think I will get a bit of a discount on rather than finding it at a dealer or it's just not available elsewhere. There are also sellers who think their items are worth more than they really are, but as you said free enterprise will determine the proper price. -- TTFN - Guy

I just set the maximum amount to what I'm willing to pay and then let it sit there. If I get beaten, so be it. I've had My bid jump by $20 in the last minute of the auction, but I still won and wanted to send a "ha ha" to whoever tried to steal it. Of course, I only buy a little bit, nothing really expensive, and nothing really rare. I suppose if I were bidding on a Kenbak or Apple I, it might be more annoying. -- Sic semper tyrannus Send eMail to ----> grenaud(a)acm.org. For contact info, see: http://home.earthlink.net/~sleepyjackal/contact.htm