Pugwash

Um ... so my example of Rolex's markup wasn't a close enough analogue to MBW wholesale, so you use diamonds as an example? Go to a wholesale shop, like a retail supplier for stationery or games/toys or anything that's not large, big ticket items and you'll see the range I'm talking about. Hang on, why are we arguing over this again? You disagree that my initial statement of the markup the OP quoted was surprisingly low, especially seeing as the Rolex models they stock are sold at 50% of what dealers sell them for? Or do you just disagree that the retail business generally uses a 40%-60% off retail wholesale figure?

It's only flashy if you drive it to an anti-capitalist rally. Don't worry, you can buy the Series 3 while still keeping your socialist ideals intact.

Shh ... you woke me up!

Did you say something?

nice

Wow, cheap! It's worth getting just to try fitting it to a case.

Not until the gen crown/tube arrive. Front view: Unmodded on the left:

As far as I know, it's just the French that use the comma for a decimal point ...

Yes and possibly, but it may cost extra. Where are you based?

Those figures are based on wholesale costs for most items I've seen wholesale vs retail prices for. For instance, Rolex use 60% for their price to the ADs if you want to talk just about watches. Google retail mark-up and you'll see 40%-60% is about right for most non-perishable goods.

No chance, we looked into it and it cost more than hosting (we pay over 20k€/month already and Akamai would be more than that). We'd have needed 24mbps from them and that's hideously expensive. We just redesigned our architecture and we found that if we reduce SQL/oracle calls (and replace Oracle with SQL servers with enough RAM to cache the entire database), we can get near static HTML speeds. We have loads more optimisations we can do (like a lighttpd server for images, CSS and JS means faster static images and no SAN needed) but we've reduced our overheads to the point our hardware is simply good enough for another 6 months to a year. There is simply no current need to optimise after this step. Just as well, because it'll take that long for my replacement to get up to speed.

Thank you, that'll be 500 euros. Oh, sorry, you just sounded like one of my clients. Hey, Admin, when do my memberships (note plural) run out?

I hope so, otherwise I'd be out of work by now. The absolute best way to improve site performance, apart from engaging Akamai, would be to have a barrage of Squid servers taking the load off the PHP/SQL requests. That would reduce SQL calls to just being the search requests and a flush on the dynamic pages every 15-20 sec. It would require some hardcore mod_rewrite but you've got the CPU for it.

Check out that mirror reflection on the crown guard. I found that getting rid of metal was easy, but getting it to look like you hadn't attacked it with metalworking tools was the challenge. Excuse the state of the watch. It's far from showroom condition, apart from the crown guards. ps. I have one thing to do that it appears no other crown guard fixers do, so I'm going to leave it a secret for now ...

I've just finished the crown guards on the 1680. I'll go take a pic for this thread... back in a few minutes

Is the dollar that sucky? FYI, hardware isn't the major expense running this site: bandwidth is, if I'm not mistaken, which is why we need to keep encouraging people to join up. If you have a cash drive and get a super server, people think it's all that's needed, but the reality is running costs are higher than server costs.

CPU isn't an issue. Next upgrade should be 15kRPM u320 striped 'cudas. Best VM drives you can get. In fact, I've got a couple of 36GB 15k 'cudas here, if they'll help. They're a little noisy for my home server.

I know what to get you for your birthday.

For info, this is what a 16233 looks like:

From Thailand? Counterfeiting in Thailand isn't going to be stopped because someone mentions where a stall is.

That could be the angle or, as I suggested earlier, the work of the little wizards of Beelzebub, the lord of the flies.

I think it's an optical illusion that's making our brains jelly-like. Once I put the grid over the dial, the off-axis dial suddenly looked back on-axis. Is it a cenobyte watch or a hell-dimension portal? Does it sometimes weep blood or scream like the souls of a thousand damned sinners?

I'm unconvinced. Something about it is bugging me though ...

At last! Hmm ... is that dial off-axis?

Your 1950 text is bugging me. I recommend a new dial.