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Are you implying that the Staples website noticed your supplier's prices and adjusted?
Marc
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Implying be damned, I am stating it as a fact.
It is a repeatable experiment.
Not just Staples.
Viking Direct sell a certain toner for £207 each, and after I went to my supplier then back to Viking, it had dropped to £156, so I know what they are up to.
It also shows how much markup these big companies are making.
But then they have big overheads, whereas I do not and can under cut them.
---------------------------------
Obscurum per obscurius.
Ad astra per alas porci.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
CCC Link[ ^]
Can you Help?
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Dalek Dave wrote: Implying be damned, I am stating it as a fact.
I didn't think that was possible. Aren't cookies encrypted so one site cannot read another's? Doesn't the browser itself prevent accessing another site's cookies?
At least for the websites I've programmed, I've encrypted my cookies (that sounds kinky, doesn't it?) But being a neophyte to all this, please correct me.
Marc
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see here[^]
"...the travel site Orbitz, have been accused of charging more to people who shop from a Mac because Mac users have a higher average household income."
Another reason to dump the fruity one.
---------------------------------
Obscurum per obscurius.
Ad astra per alas porci.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
CCC Link[ ^]
Can you Help?
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Your OP and comments, and Marc's, upvoted: fascinating !
Hi Dave,
I am as curious as Marc is to understand how it may be possible for "Supplier X" to know you have visited "Supplier Y" and swaparoo pricing.
It seems logical to me that you can (server-side) detect the IP address, and, possibly, hardware platform, and browser type, of an incoming request, but beyond that ... well ... I thought ... well ... I am ready to have my eyes opened ... again.
thanks, Bill
“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection." Edward Sapir, 1929
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Dalek Dave wrote: see here[^]
Wow, that was a fascinating read. I remember this being a scandal a while ago. Thanks!
Marc
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I remember reading about a technique that could reveal what web pages had been navigated to.
A web page has a hidden section with a list of URL's. It maps different CSS styles to links visited (ie in the history) verses not visited.
A simple bit of javascript will then let you find the style of each URL, determining whether or not it is in the browser history.
All a vendor would need to do is scrap the product URLs from competitors websites and include these in this hidden section.
Pays to shop around, I guess.
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From the article you noted:
When you change your user agent you can trick a web page into thinking you're on a different device or operating system.
Sure, that hides your hardware config, alright.
Since when does a "mobile" browser have video with a 1920 x 1080 pixel configuration?!
Then again, if they have that size of video on a "mobile" device, they can afford the higher prices anyway!
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Marc Clifton wrote: At least for the websites I've programmed, I've encrypted my cookies
Hi Marc,
Care to open the kimono a little, and mention, in general terms, how you did this.
thanks, Bill
“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection." Edward Sapir, 1929
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BillWoodruff wrote: Care to open the kimono a little, and mention, in general terms, how you did this.
I've only done this in Ruby on Rails because that's what I've used to write a couple websites, but I'm sure the code:
# create an authentication token if the user has clicked on remember me
auth_token = SecureRandom.urlsafe_base64
user.authentication_token = auth_token
cookies.permanent[:auth_token] = auth_token
is very similar to what you can do with ASP.NET. Here, both the cookie key and its data are a random code. Now, there are also many algorithms, from simple hashing to more complex encryption, that you can use for data rather than just storing random authentication codes.
From my article: User Authentication in Ruby on Rails[^]
Marc
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Quote: I am trying to price up an order.
So I look at my suppliers website to get my base price, then go to Staples to see what sort of price people would pay.
I am aiming to pitch just over midway between the two.
Quote: But then they have big overheads, whereas I do not and can under cut them.
So it is OK for you to use your competion's resources to find out what their proposed price is and then undercut them, but when they do it, it is wrong? 
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You're talking to someone who goes on expensive overseas holidays while begging in the lounge to pay for his wife's education, and uses tax loopholes to avoid paying tax, yet you seem surprised at this latest money-grabbing immorality?
MVVM # - I did it My Way
___________________________________________
Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011
.\\axxx
(That's an 'M')
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Hey, I didn't pay for that holiday, it was a freebie!
---------------------------------
Obscurum per obscurius.
Ad astra per alas porci.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
CCC Link[ ^]
Can you Help?
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Surprised? No.
It was a subtle attempt to point out his hypocrisy.
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I don't know about Dave, but my problem with that is not they're undercutting each other (please do), but they only do it when they know the customer has found a better price.
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That is how the game is played.
Everyone in business does this to some extent when trying to grow or even maintain their sales volume. The only problem is when someone gets financing to support them so that they can sell below cost to cause others to go out of business and then jack up the price once there is no competition. On a larger scale, this is why countries have anti-dumping laws to help prevent foreign competitors from destroying their domestic industries.
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TnTinMn wrote: That is how the game is played.
Doesn't matter, I still hate it. It's obviously the result of their conscious decision to shaft the customer as much as they possibly can.
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I use CCleaner from Piriform to get rid of unwanted pastries. It's fast and does a whole lot of other stuff (all configurable in settings) to clean up your machine. I can recommend it. The Pro version can be bought online from Piriform for under $30 per annum, but a slightly more basic version can be downloaded from Piriform free of charge. Apparently several large corporation use this as their corporate computer cleaner upper on company networks. (I think one customer is Boeing.)
Cornelius Henning
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
-- Donald Knuth
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Is the Pro version worth it?
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Quote: Is the Pro version worth it?
Probably not - haven't checked in detail, but when some company offers me a good product that we use on some computers in our household, I feel it's only appropriate that I pay for at least one copy. Chalk one up the stupidity of my conscience. 
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An update to my experiments with Apple hardware and Visual Studio.
I'm running under bootcamp but will eventually transition to parallels. I spent most of yesterday installing Win7, Visual Studio, SQL Server, Office, and all my little utilities that make life workable. The fan on the Macbook (which I didn't even realise existed) was running full boar for most of the day. There is no packing dust in my machine anymore.
Initial results are in.
First, the machine is being used for a little email checking, a few per tests on Visual Studio, and for building and running the actual CodeProject.com site off the laptop. It reports about 13hrs of battery life. 5hrs after opening it up this morning it's been working and snoozing and is still saying 11hrs left. I'm impressed.
Second, performance. I have what I used to consider a beast of a dev machine, though I have stuck to only 8GB RAM. It's always felt fast enough for me and a pair of striped SSDs as my main partition means disk access is great. Our main solution has 78 projects and 1 very large website so I ran a full rebuild multiple times head to head
| MAchine | Build time | | Desktop: Quad core i7 920 2.7GHz w/ 8GB RAM, twin striped SSDs | 2min 57s | | Macbook Air: dual core Haswell 1.7GHz w/8GB RAM | 2min 04s |
So my Macbook Air blows away my desktop. It has outstanding battery life, has an inbuilt UPS and goes with me so I can actually do serious development anywhere.
I'm sold.
As soon as I can get my grubby hands on a Samsung ATIV Book 9 I'll repeat the results and compare.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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Chris Maunder wrote: Our main solution has 78 projects and 1 very large website
Really? Which website is that? 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Wow - 831 members. Soon be time for the 1,000th member celebrations! 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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