Re: Detecting CPUs and cores

In article <1186519578.883049.102410@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Twisted <twisted0n3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You neglect to note that doing so is underhanded and dishonest.
Advocating discriminatory pricing? Shame on you! How consumer-hostile.

This is quite common and some of its current implementations seem to
work reasonably well. It's generally called market segmentation and
attempts to exploit various mechanisms that encourage wealthy people
to spend more on the product than what the less wealthy are prepared
to do.

A few examples would include:

1. Price-drops over time. You see this as a matter of course in the
computer games market. Games will come out at a high initial price
($50 perhaps) and slowly drop down over time, eventually ending up in
the bargain bin ($10 to $20 perhaps). The wealthy people will buy it
the day it comes out (preorder it even) at full price while the more
stingy will pay less, later.

2. Mail-in rebates and coupons in general. These are annoying and take
a fair bit of time and attention from the customer. They are therefore
not appealing to the wealthy customer who has better things to do with
his time (and whose hourly wages may even make it a financially
superior option to work an extra 15-30 minutes rather than take that
same time handling the rebates/coupons) whileas the less wealthy will
often find them a highly valuable supplement to their domestic budget.

While these may be seen as evil mechanisms, it should be considered
that they also contribute to making products cheaper than they
otherwise would have been to poorer people and personally I don't
consider that a bad thing.

And again a properly competitive market won't let you get away with
*** like that. If you offer the same thing to B at a lower price B
can turn right around and sell it to A for a penny more, turn a
profit, and you quit being able to sell to A at a high price as he
buys from B instead of from you.

The problem is, the well-off people don't care about those savings
anyway, so the market for B is really rather limited. In fact, A may
find it more valuable being able to brag to his friends about how he
buys all of his games (say) at full price anyway. Humans have always
liked to flaunt their wealth when they have it. Admitting that you get
your stuff cheaper by having your neighbour collect coupons or
whatever may be socially embarrassing.

Cheers,
Bent D
--
Bent Dalager - bcd@xxxxxxx - http://www.pvv.org/~bcd
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