The $100 360 From Amazon

For Turkey Massacre Day - Amazon may be selling 1,000 Xbox 360 Cores for $100. I say "may" because it's one out of four possible nominees - although at last check it was ahead in the voting (which is now closed).

I will probably be stuck in Central Illinois and removed from the power of technology. In general. So I'd say my chances of getting there in time are pretty slim, since I imagine Amazon handles 1,000 concurrent connections regularly. What that means is that the whole thing will probably be over by the time the little hand moves another step.

A few tips, from a web developer, in trying for this thing:

- Have one browser window open. Shut down all other apps. In fact, shut down the browser and start it up again. Windows users - you might even reboot. Browsers are clientside applications and a lot more processor heavy and memory heavy than people give them credit for ... especially with big sites like Amazon.

- Go to the page early and reload it. Just once will do, but this should get those common images and filles cached locally on your computer. Don't shut down your browser now (a new sessions may check for new files). You might double check your cache settings to be certain they aren't set to something like "Request From Server Every Time". Cache is speed, and speed is good.

- When the time comes, get a few minutes early and don't be shy about stopping and refreshing. It's true that web servers will just see these as mutliple requests - but as long as Amazon has prepped for the load ... the client doesn't really care.

- Chances are - the page will not need to be fully loaded to be functional. This is rarely the case, especially for forms, because the submit button is generally right when the form ends and should be after all the info that needs to be sent on.


Well, good luck and good hunting. The 360 hasn't had enough appeal to me to drag me in - but it's really hard to argue with the price, even for a Core unit.




tagged: 360, gaming