Similar refinement: I would do a descending clock auction: start at $19, every 6 hours price goes down another $1, maximum number of copies sold in the auction is, say, 100,000. An optional (in my opinion useful) subtlety is to keep progressive sales information private, so the fear of missing the deal is the more palpable to potential buyers.

I think a similar format would work for a site like woot.com. Maybe it has been tried?

1996: I was an contract programmer. As a favor to a friend and fellow contractor, I agreed to update some ancient POS (point of sale, piece of s...) software for one of his clients. The program ran on SCO Unix. Interface was curses. I had never used any flavor of Unix before, and I wasn't about to buy a license for SCO. So, 12 hours after meeting with the client for the first time, I had installed a dual boot RedHat system and got the code to compile under ncurses, which required a few dozen changes to the least-common-API. I was using vi to edit the code, which was also brand new to me then. About a week later, the improvements completed and running under Linux, I took the modified code back to the customer on a floppy, to deliver the finished product. To my astounded delight, it compiled and worked under SCO!

The ease with which I, as a developer, was able to adapt to this alien platform, forever linked me to it. Having RedHat installed on my development machine (a beefy Pentium 166 as I recall), I kept it there and started using it more and more.