Posts by Mark Finn 14 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2007
Seriously? This is a real article? I clicked on it expecting a bit of a witticism, possibly an insult aimed at those who would actually be interested in such a list or similar.
But no, it appears not.
It would seem that the time has come for El Reg to hang up the "fanboi" and "jobsian" comments and acknowledge (or admit) their place in the apple marketing machine.
If I buy it it is mine and I will sell it on to anyone I damn well please at any price I damn well please anywhere I care to do so. If Microsoft sells me a product in China for whatever price and I can sell it wherever else for more, I will do so, while acknowledging the right of the receiving country to levy taxes on it. As long as the taxes are at the same rate levied on similar products from other sources..
I might be persuaded to hold off on that if they can show a contract I signed, with proof that I was not under duress and understood the terms of the contract.
This is China (and I write as one within the country). Those arrested might possibly have been ringleaders. Those charged and sentenced were almost certainly not.
No-one with money here ever goes to prison. Standard operating practice is to slip the local chief of police (or the minister for justice (Hah) if the case is serious enough) a red envelope, at which point the police grab some unfortunate migrant worker of the right height./age/gender from the street, clean him/her up and see to the switch.
The only exceptions are where someone has managed to embarrass senior party members, at which point no-one dares get involved at any price.
If those arrested were guilty of piracy at all (quite probable) they most likely never were ringleaders and those currently held certainly aren't.
Lose the dole. Or at least bring it down to a realistic survival level. It'll take about a decade to get through, but once the maggots of the present have to raise their kids on potatoes and tap-water the next gen will shape up pdq, and buckle down to some serious study.
What the UK is seeing now is the standard malaise that overtakes any society where the economic system is out of whack. Too many people are receiving too many benefits they haven't earned. The Romans had slaves, the Brits have the dole.
Re: "If you were sitting in a plane on the runway and found out that your company had written the plane's software..."
You Bar Steward.
I used to be a C/Pro*C/Oracle coder in Accenture's Manchester & Dublin Offices.
I'm in China at the moment and am due for a trip home.
Do you have any idea how long the Trans Mongolian "Express" (an off-shoot of the Trans-Siberian) takes to run the full route? Lets just say that if you leave in late November you'll need two calendars to find your arrival date....
I'll never sit still on a flight again.
Your prices seem a little high and the 90% figure for piracy seems low.
A standard audio cd retails in Shenyang for 5 yuan, in fuzhou for 6 yuan and Beijing for as much as 7 yuan. Thats about 35 to 50 pence, mostly at the bottom end of the scale.
They're not popular though as you can get any band/group/singers entire discography in high-bitrate mp3 format with a few concert videos thrown in on a double DVD set for 10 to 12 yuan.
As for the 90% pirated, maybe in city centre Shanghai with police instructed to crack down it might drop that low... until the police left and the cupboards were re-opened.
Even the foreign chains here (Walmart, Carrefour etc) exclusively stock cheaply copied disks with photocopied paper sleeves n a plastic envelope. They charge four times the going rate for them and have significantly lower quality encoding (and production) than the 5 yuan disks on the streets.
One can't help suspecting the point may have flown just above your head there...
The only thing worse than failing to check code (or at least checking out what those who did check it found) is running systems and programs that don't make it possibe to do so.
(Icons Suck. Sorry guys.Waste of code).
Sounds about right for Brazil actually. Tax there is just insane. Without exaggeration, a simple commercial purchase can end up owing tax to upwards of 20 different local, state and national agencies, and cumulative taxes well in excess of 100% on imported "Luxuries" (including all forms of IT gear) are far from uncommon.
So, how does anyone do business in Brazil then? Simply put, one of the two reasons taxes are so high is that 90% plus of businesses simply do not pay them. Cisco is in this case being roped in as they can afford to pay and will, in doing so, clear the tax burden for every other business in operation for a few months.
Brazil is one of those special states that discovered that by not putting obvious barriers between the regular Joe-screwed-over-Smith and the Joe-government-job-Smith they can get the populace to keep playing along in hopes of someone in their family landing a government post and retiring in a decade with enough funds and ever increasing pension to keep the entire family in luxury for a full generation or two. (Beat that for a perfectly logical run-on sentence if you can).
(I hate Icons)
Given the option between working for that $2 a day and not working...
Yes, indentured servitude exists here, but it is not widespread and certainly not legal. No more socially acceptable than the East-European women coerced into "Entertainment Employment" in every major city in the UK.
Don't get me wrong, I in no form support the structures in place here, but foreign factories and manufacturers working for export are far from the worst places to work. Keep in mind 1000euros a month here would be a very very good wage, a long way above the average for skilled labour. $600 a month would be an attractive proposition for unskilled work anywhere outside the major cities.
(I hate Icons)
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