India vs Pakistan. If the boy got certified in India it was not reflected by the Pakistan media and as far as they are concerned it never existed or was fraudulent. Same for vice versa. I sometimes really wonder how did these two avoid managing to nuke each other.
1. These files were played on the radio. I could have recorded them at roughly the same quality and owned them for nothing in first place.
2. As far as quality goes they are 128Kbit fixed rate encoded MP3. Any classical audiophile will puke at the idea of using it for anything but commuter or office noice supression. Further to that as far ast the 9th goes (I have yet tofind time to listen to the rest) the vocals are relatively lame and the conductor lacks the necessary level of fashism to conduct it the way it is supposed to be conducted. I have listened to 9th under the stick of Herbert von Karajan and compared to that the BBC recording smacks of amateurism.
3. It will not stop people who are in fact audiophiles and classics fans from buying proper recordings. It will not decrease the music labels revenue. So why don't they just go blow and get a clue about their market.
50K-100K (typo on my side, I meant 100 and wrote 10. Bummer.). You say 80K. Average taxi life is 400K. That is 5 battery packs. The environment where the hybrid has the largest fuel economy is also the environment where it wears down fastest.
Thanks for confirming the numbers by the way. These were _exactly_ the numbers I meant to say and I would have said if I did not mistype 10 for 100.
Wrong math. Under NYC conditions (or any large city conditons) the Prius will need a new battery pack every 50K-10K miles.
Cab companies (and drivers) are not stupid. There is a reason why they do not use hybrids anywhere in the world. Diesels, Gas Conversions (CNG or LPG) - yes (95% + of European taxis are either diesel or LPG). Hybrid - nope. The numbers simply do not add up. 6-8 battery packs over the average lifetime of a cab will kill any advantage from fuel savings.
Compared to that diesel, CNG or LPG actually have longer lifetime and lower maintenance than a plain petrol engine due to lower engine wear.
Ever tried to write shellcode for Alpha? It was even thought to be impossible for more then 5 years until someone published a way to do some limited borderline cases in 2000.
Ever tried to write shellcode for 680xx? Same as above, even harder due to the protection model vagaries.
Basically these arches use a different protection model and instruction encoding from x86. Both of these make writing shellcode nearly impossible.
Redhat supports x86, x86_64, i64 and some power and zSeries stuff. Compared to that Debian supports Alpha, ARM, HP PA-RISC, Intel x86, Intel IA-64, Motorola 680x0, MIPS, MIPS (DEC), PowerPC, IBM S/390, SPARC. It also has the outrageously silly policy of trying to release updates for all of them at the same time.
Frankly, all the "problematic" architectures for which there are build problems are "security through obscurity" by themselves. If an update for them is delayed by up to 2 weeks it is usually a "Who cares, only two living people know how to write an exploit for this platform anyway".
First, there is a policy problem here. If a security update is not available due to lack of build systems for a specific architecture (ARM), well so be it. It should not hold the updates for all remaining architectures the way it does now.
And if someone wants to see security updates for this specific architecture (ARM) they might as well donate. The only ARM motherboards useable for a build system are the developer toolkits and these cost money.
Besides wasting more electricity you also drastically increase the speed at which the system deteriorates:
On a cheap white box systems without thermally controlled fans the power supply fan is usually driven of non-stabilized voltage prior to it being fed into the 12V circuit. This voltage is higher when consumption is higher and the fan runs at higher revs and dies faster. The more power the system eats the quicker the fans dies. Result - dead computer and possible fire hazard.
On more expensive "branded" systems with thermally controlled fans the speed of all fans is proportional to the power dissipation in the case. As a result on some brand machines the fan dies in less then 6 months at 100% CPU (Compaq P3 DeskPro) or the CPU is thermally throttled (Compaq P3 Prosignia and many P4 Evos). Result - performance at around 20% of the expected or computer requiring repair in around a year or less
Nearly all modern motherboards have 20+ high quality electrolitic capacitors. If these blow up the bus gets noisy and the motherboard becomes useless. This is especially pronounced on miniITX and other small factor systems which tend to heat up very quickly to 45-50C inside. Running them at 100% round the clock causes the capacitors to start leaking in 6-9 months and the motherboard is a dead hunk of metal in a year or so.
Ad naseum
If you add up all the numbers using spare CPU from desktops on an average campus does not make sense. You lose on the average 150+£ or so per system per year in electricity, repairs due to thermal failures and accelerated depreciation. Once you add helldesk and IT staff hours caused by the failures the numbers add up to 200£+. There is no way on earth you can get 200£ per year worth of computing power back so the numbers do not add up (at least for Compaq desktop gear).
Would you mind showing us a picture that is capable of simulating live blood flow?
In btw - taking a movie in IR of the hand will not work because it is very easily detectable. Quantisation effects and all kinds of wierdness from having the scanner out of sync with the projector.
There is no decent space combat simulator on the market any more. The last more or less playable I remember was Tie Fighter vs X-Wing which is 7 years old now. Nothing since.
I think Lucas can make at least 60-70 million by releasing the old X-Wing/Tie Figher titles for the new hardware. Even more if they release it with an updated AI and game engine.
fingerprints may be scarred, burned, or otherwise mutilated
Really? What about heart disease, varicose veins, some kidney problems, arthritis, reumatic disorders of all shapes and forms?
While veins are clearly less volatile compared to fingerprints and face for a 0-40 age group, their validity is likely to decrease sharply after that when all of the above sets in.
So IMHO this is good only for an employee identification. Especially in a country with very low rates for all of the above (Japan). If it is deployed wider there will be no end to V Meldrew style problems.
Funny bit is that this is not the first time an offer like this has been around. The Russians had a similar set published in the 1980-es. 200 volumes. It was not bad, though personally I found the selection slightly biased. And it took one wall worth of library space in an average size apartment.
This one looks considerably better and clearly less biased. Most french classics are there. So are most of what the westerners consider for Russian classics.
In other words you should lie to both HR and the agent.
While I myself have been tempted by this on many occasions I would suggest that you rather not do it. If I am interviewing and I catch a person who has lied to get the interview he/she is accelerated to LEA right away. Same for many other people.
Basically, if you are caught to lie once there is no guarantee that you are telling the truth.
All I can suggest is that you skip these. Don't even try to bother. What generally happens is that companies that run this practice are generally into the checklist mania and also put performance targets on HR. If the HR fails to fill the positions which it usually does, it gets outsourced or subcontracted. While the first time subcontractor is usually similar to the original bunch of arseholes, the next time around it is someone more sane. I have observed this happen to at least 5 or 6 well known large companies in the UK. Dunno about US.
Well... I would not be so sure. As a matter of fact the message is quite vague and unclear.
You have Intel which has opened research centers in India. It are there because there is qualified labour which it cannot import in the US (if IT graduating numbers are falling, electronics are really abissmal). If you are buying any new Intel you are buying an Indian design. Yep. That is the reality. Last generation of Pentiums is not the US deep pipeline design, it is the P3-mobile derived design which was moved to the new Intel research center in India several years ago (hint Intel codes their designs by geographic places close to where it is designed, check the names on some the most recent chip core announcements).
You also have HSBC and the like which are moving there everything they can on a cost only basis.
Lapsus linguae. I wrote statuatory while I should have written customary.
That is what my US collegues had when working for the same company I used to work. 3 weeks payed leave and up to 2 weeks of sick leave with more then 3 days requiring proof.
And it is the normal conditions you get in California or Colorado bigcorp.com nowdays.
You are dumping all Indians into one basket. That is both stupid and insulting. You have the cheap Indian software which is "you get what you have bargained for".
That is shit.
And here is an example of what happens if you outsource to there: Lucent spectacular VOIP failure. It was the market leader, it outsourced all of its software development on it to India around 1998 and it was no more in 6 months.
There is also the expensive ones. The ones which cost about as much Europeans and Americans. You once again get what you have bargained for. Worked with some of these and I have been about as happy as with any American or European subcontractor.
You should not really put all of them under the same label
Well... Slashdot needs an extra moderation item - -1 [misinformed, misguided and never been outside South Carolina].
First - while we have 5 weeks of vacation we do not have statuatory sick leave if a member of the family is sick. US has up to 2 of those. So if you have two kids under 14 in the family and both parents are working the numbers roughly add up to the same - 3 weeks of effective holiday.
Second - You clearly have no idea of Bureaucracy. If the problem was bureaucracy nobody would have invested in China. Or India for that matter.
Third - Unions. India has them too. Expect to hear more about them.
Culture - While I understand your bile I have to disagree with it. The highest productivity in Europe in the high tech industry is in the country that works least per day. Spain. The lowest productivity is in the country that works most - UK. This is actually reasonable if you think about it. If you work with your brain it does not help working yourself out flat and burning it.
The reasons why idiot PHBs are moving high tech jobs to India is that they like the idea of making people work flat and they count work by the hour, not by the product produced. In 2-3 years once the dust has settled it will become evident that there are no savings and whatever is gained in lower labour costs is lost in productivity (see the Culture note above).
There is also the reason why smart PHBs are moving high tech jobs to India. There are fewer and fewer native high tech graduates in Europe (both East and West) and the US. That is not the case in India and China. So if a company wants to establish a long term operation it is reasonable for it to move there.
Right. Go look in the Linux kernel for all the tweaks required for all the different PCI bridges. And then you have PCI-E and PCI-X.
From bridge perspective - yes. From device perspective - no. You can run a Sun HappyMeal on x86 and you can run an AMD lance designed for x86 on PPC. Once the bridge has been programmed the card is controlled in essentially the same way.
If you ignore the Marvell Yukon in my computer, all the various on-chipset ethernet cores and companies like Syskonnect.
And I shall ignore them. Less then 10% market share. Companies like this will end up having to supply their own drivers the way they do in the wintel world.
There is no driver-level compatibility standard for IDE/SATA/SATA2 controllers.
Not entirely correct. You cannot run it in DMA mode and you cannot control speeds and program any of the registers. But you can use the good old PIO from the days of MFM and WD17xx on nearly any PCI chipset. Just on different ports. Also most of the code to run them in the Darwin core is already there courtesy of FreeBSD.
You can not run an Adaptec SCSI controller with a Tekram driver. There is no driver-level compatibility standard for SCSI controllers.
True. The 100$ question is which ones are not already supported by MacOs X? None. All major brands are. And they are PCI cards so once the bridge and IRQs have been taken care of by the chipset drivers, the porting is straightforward. As a matter of fact the only porting necessary is fixing endian issues.
Motherboard chipset drivers!
They are already there. Darwin boots on x86 and if necessary can suck them out of the FreeBSD tree. So it exactly as I said: There are no porting issues because the main stumbling points - video, disk and I/O have already been taken care of.
All the other ones are essentially dead in the water and no longer relevant or so high end and esoteric that they use vendor drivers anyway.
Audio - you have a point. But current apple audio is a fairly simple PCI affair which will not be hard to port to x86. That is if they do not go with intel audio which means AC97 which is present on all current intel/AMD/Via hardware (with some vendor changes, but it is still programmed more or less the same way).
The days when the PC world was a swarm of competing hardware companies are long gone and long forgotten. There 2 video hardware manufacturers left (if we exclude Intel and Via which merged this into their chipset). Apple has used them both and supports both. There are around 3 network card manufacturers left (once again excluding bundles from Via and Intel) - Realtek, Broadcom and Intel (Natsemi, 3Com and AMD are marching full steam ahead into oblivion). Apple used at least 2 of them in MacOS X enabled machines. PCI is PCI regardless of the platform. IDE is IDE regardless of the platform. SCSI support is already there. USB is also already there.
So essentially there is nearly nothing to port as far as all major components of the PC are concerned. So if you look at a PC as shipped by DELL (before you buy 20 different garbage gadgets in the local gadget shop) there are no drivers to write for it. All it takes is to port drivers for the SAME hardware from existing Macs.
It is making money as a result of a large number of people running something that is essentially a business without running it as a business complying with the relevant consumer regulation and very often without paying taxes. The latter is what will drive ebay down back to where it was sooner or later. It is firmly in the sights of the fiscal authorities as well as the consumer watchdogs all over Europe and it is only a matter of time until it is hit by a full broadside under the waterline. Add to that the competition watchdogs which are under a heavy pressure from businesses who sell legally. Add to that customs and excise.
Frankly it is not a company into which I would invest a penny at the moment. They had a solid business case while operating in the US. Moving their business into places with stricter consumer legislation was a bad idea.
We were buying Compaq. The actual models I am referring to are Prosignia (784MB RAM) - pre-Capellas product, Pressario (first post-Capellas product) - down to 512MB, cheap chinese generic junk motherboard and a shitty noisy fan made in Mexico, followed by Evo (first Carly product) - up to 2-4G RAM, custom motherboard with a correct thermal design.
You may be buying from HPPaq but it is very clear that you are not repairing them.
Slashdot Mirror
India vs Pakistan. If the boy got certified in India it was not reflected by the Pakistan media and as far as they are concerned it never existed or was fraudulent. Same for vice versa. I sometimes really wonder how did these two avoid managing to nuke each other.
So WTF do you do with the resulting NaOH or even worse NaOH mixed in a sodium silicate gel?
Well
1. These files were played on the radio. I could have recorded them at roughly the same quality and owned them for nothing in first place.
2. As far as quality goes they are 128Kbit fixed rate encoded MP3. Any classical audiophile will puke at the idea of using it for anything but commuter or office noice supression. Further to that as far ast the 9th goes (I have yet tofind time to listen to the rest) the vocals are relatively lame and the conductor lacks the necessary level of fashism to conduct it the way it is supposed to be conducted. I have listened to 9th under the stick of Herbert von Karajan and compared to that the BBC recording smacks of amateurism.
3. It will not stop people who are in fact audiophiles and classics fans from buying proper recordings. It will not decrease the music labels revenue. So why don't they just go blow and get a clue about their market.
50K-100K (typo on my side, I meant 100 and wrote 10. Bummer.). You say 80K. Average taxi life is 400K. That is 5 battery packs. The environment where the hybrid has the largest fuel economy is also the environment where it wears down fastest.
Thanks for confirming the numbers by the way. These were _exactly_ the numbers I meant to say and I would have said if I did not mistype 10 for 100.
Wrong math. Under NYC conditions (or any large city conditons) the Prius will need a new battery pack every 50K-10K miles.
Cab companies (and drivers) are not stupid. There is a reason why they do not use hybrids anywhere in the world. Diesels, Gas Conversions (CNG or LPG) - yes (95% + of European taxis are either diesel or LPG). Hybrid - nope. The numbers simply do not add up. 6-8 battery packs over the average lifetime of a cab will kill any advantage from fuel savings.
Compared to that diesel, CNG or LPG actually have longer lifetime and lower maintenance than a plain petrol engine due to lower engine wear.
Nope.
It is outrageously silly.
Ever tried to write shellcode for Alpha? It was even thought to be impossible for more then 5 years until someone published a way to do some limited borderline cases in 2000.
Ever tried to write shellcode for 680xx? Same as above, even harder due to the protection model vagaries.
Basically these arches use a different protection model and instruction encoding from x86. Both of these make writing shellcode nearly impossible.
So on, so fourth.
That is not the problem. Problem is elsewhere.
Redhat supports x86, x86_64, i64 and some power and zSeries stuff. Compared to that Debian supports Alpha, ARM, HP PA-RISC, Intel x86, Intel IA-64, Motorola 680x0, MIPS, MIPS (DEC), PowerPC, IBM S/390, SPARC. It also has the outrageously silly policy of trying to release updates for all of them at the same time.
Frankly, all the "problematic" architectures for which there are build problems are "security through obscurity" by themselves. If an update for them is delayed by up to 2 weeks it is usually a "Who cares, only two living people know how to write an exploit for this platform anyway".
First, there is a policy problem here. If a security update is not available due to lack of build systems for a specific architecture (ARM), well so be it. It should not hold the updates for all remaining architectures the way it does now.
And if someone wants to see security updates for this specific architecture (ARM) they might as well donate. The only ARM motherboards useable for a build system are the developer toolkits and these cost money.
- On a cheap white box systems without thermally controlled fans the power supply fan is usually driven of non-stabilized voltage prior to it being fed into the 12V circuit. This voltage is higher when consumption is higher and the fan runs at higher revs and dies faster. The more power the system eats the quicker the fans dies. Result - dead computer and possible fire hazard.
- On more expensive "branded" systems with thermally controlled fans the speed of all fans is proportional to the power dissipation in the case. As a result on some brand machines the fan dies in less then 6 months at 100% CPU (Compaq P3 DeskPro) or the CPU is thermally throttled (Compaq P3 Prosignia and many P4 Evos). Result - performance at around 20% of the expected or computer requiring repair in around a year or less
- Nearly all modern motherboards have 20+ high quality electrolitic capacitors. If these blow up the bus gets noisy and the motherboard becomes useless. This is especially pronounced on miniITX and other small factor systems which tend to heat up very quickly to 45-50C inside. Running them at 100% round the clock causes the capacitors to start leaking in 6-9 months and the motherboard is a dead hunk of metal in a year or so.
- Ad naseum
If you add up all the numbers using spare CPU from desktops on an average campus does not make sense. You lose on the average 150+£ or so per system per year in electricity, repairs due to thermal failures and accelerated depreciation. Once you add helldesk and IT staff hours caused by the failures the numbers add up to 200£+. There is no way on earth you can get 200£ per year worth of computing power back so the numbers do not add up (at least for Compaq desktop gear).Err... You clearly have never heard of Italy. Or Eastern Europe. Or Russia for that matter.
Not really.
Would you mind showing us a picture that is capable of simulating live blood flow?
In btw - taking a movie in IR of the hand will not work because it is very easily detectable. Quantisation effects and all kinds of wierdness from having the scanner out of sync with the projector.
Ahem.
There is no decent space combat simulator on the market any more. The last more or less playable I remember was Tie Fighter vs X-Wing which is 7 years old now. Nothing since.
I think Lucas can make at least 60-70 million by releasing the old X-Wing/Tie Figher titles for the new hardware. Even more if they release it with an updated AI and game engine.
fingerprints may be scarred, burned, or otherwise mutilated
Really? What about heart disease, varicose veins, some kidney problems, arthritis, reumatic disorders of all shapes and forms?
While veins are clearly less volatile compared to fingerprints and face for a 0-40 age group, their validity is likely to decrease sharply after that when all of the above sets in.
So IMHO this is good only for an employee identification. Especially in a country with very low rates for all of the above (Japan). If it is deployed wider there will be no end to V Meldrew
style problems.
40% or so...
Funny bit is that this is not the first time an offer like this has been around. The Russians had a similar set published in the 1980-es. 200 volumes. It was not bad, though personally I found the selection slightly biased. And it took one wall worth of library space in an average size apartment.
This one looks considerably better and clearly less biased. Most french classics are there. So are most of what the westerners consider for Russian classics.
In other words you should lie to both HR and the agent.
While I myself have been tempted by this on many occasions I would suggest that you rather not do it. If I am interviewing and I catch a person who has lied to get the interview he/she is accelerated to LEA right away. Same for many other people.
Basically, if you are caught to lie once there is no guarantee that you are telling the truth.
All I can suggest is that you skip these. Don't even try to bother. What generally happens is that companies that run this practice are generally into the checklist mania and also put performance targets on HR. If the HR fails to fill the positions which it usually does, it gets outsourced or subcontracted. While the first time subcontractor is usually similar to the original bunch of arseholes, the next time around it is someone more sane. I have observed this happen to at least 5 or 6 well known large companies in the UK. Dunno about US.
Well... I would not be so sure. As a matter of fact the message is quite vague and unclear.
You have Intel which has opened research centers in India. It are there because there is qualified labour which it cannot import in the US (if IT graduating numbers are falling, electronics are really abissmal). If you are buying any new Intel you are buying an Indian design. Yep. That is the reality. Last generation of Pentiums is not the US deep pipeline design, it is the P3-mobile derived design which was moved to the new Intel research center in India several years ago (hint Intel codes their designs by geographic places close to where it is designed, check the names on some the most recent chip core announcements).
You also have HSBC and the like which are moving there everything they can on a cost only basis.
And IBM which is doing both.
I would not call this a clear message.
You're severely misinformed.
Lapsus linguae. I wrote statuatory while I should have written customary.
That is what my US collegues had when working for the same company I used to work. 3 weeks payed leave and up to 2 weeks of sick leave with more then 3 days requiring proof.
And it is the normal conditions you get in California or Colorado bigcorp.com nowdays.
You are dumping all Indians into one basket. That is both stupid and insulting. You have the cheap Indian software which is "you get what you have bargained for".
That is shit.
And here is an example of what happens if you outsource to there: Lucent spectacular VOIP failure. It was the market leader, it outsourced all of its software development on it to India around 1998 and it was no more in 6 months.
There is also the expensive ones. The ones which cost about as much Europeans and Americans. You once again get what you have bargained for. Worked with some of these and I have been about as happy as with any American or European subcontractor.
You should not really put all of them under the same label
First - while we have 5 weeks of vacation we do not have statuatory sick leave if a member of the family is sick. US has up to 2 of those. So if you have two kids under 14 in the family and both parents are working the numbers roughly add up to the same - 3 weeks of effective holiday.
Second - You clearly have no idea of Bureaucracy. If the problem was bureaucracy nobody would have invested in China. Or India for that matter.
Third - Unions. India has them too. Expect to hear more about them.
Culture - While I understand your bile I have to disagree with it. The highest productivity in Europe in the high tech industry is in the country that works least per day. Spain. The lowest productivity is in the country that works most - UK. This is actually reasonable if you think about it. If you work with your brain it does not help working yourself out flat and burning it.
The reasons why idiot PHBs are moving high tech jobs to India is that they like the idea of making people work flat and they count work by the hour, not by the product produced. In 2-3 years once the dust has settled it will become evident that there are no savings and whatever is gained in lower labour costs is lost in productivity (see the Culture note above).
There is also the reason why smart PHBs are moving high tech jobs to India. There are fewer and fewer native high tech graduates in Europe (both East and West) and the US. That is not the case in India and China. So if a company wants to establish a long term operation it is reasonable for it to move there.
And true.
Been there, seen that.
From bridge perspective - yes. From device perspective - no. You can run a Sun HappyMeal on x86 and you can run an AMD lance designed for x86 on PPC. Once the bridge has been programmed the card is controlled in essentially the same way.
If you ignore the Marvell Yukon in my computer, all the various on-chipset ethernet cores and companies like Syskonnect.
And I shall ignore them. Less then 10% market share. Companies like this will end up having to supply their own drivers the way they do in the wintel world.
There is no driver-level compatibility standard for IDE/SATA/SATA2 controllers.
Not entirely correct. You cannot run it in DMA mode and you cannot control speeds and program any of the registers. But you can use the good old PIO from the days of MFM and WD17xx on nearly any PCI chipset. Just on different ports. Also most of the code to run them in the Darwin core is already there courtesy of FreeBSD.
You can not run an Adaptec SCSI controller with a Tekram driver. There is no driver-level compatibility standard for SCSI controllers.
True. The 100$ question is which ones are not already supported by MacOs X? None. All major brands are. And they are PCI cards so once the bridge and IRQs have been taken care of by the chipset drivers, the porting is straightforward. As a matter of fact the only porting necessary is fixing endian issues. Motherboard chipset drivers!
They are already there. Darwin boots on x86 and if necessary can suck them out of the FreeBSD tree. So it exactly as I said: There are no porting issues because the main stumbling points - video, disk and I/O have already been taken care of.
Next time think before you post. Cheers...
SCSI may be SCSI but a Tekram SCSI controller is not an Adaptec SCSI controller
So may I ask which PCI SCSI controllers MacOS X does not support?
Adaptec - supported
NCR/LSI/Symbios - supported
Tekram - supported
All the other ones are essentially dead in the water and no longer relevant or so high end and esoteric that they use vendor drivers anyway.
Audio - you have a point. But current apple audio is a fairly simple PCI affair which will not be hard to port to x86. That is if they do not go with intel audio which means AC97 which is present on all current intel/AMD/Via hardware (with some vendor changes, but it is still programmed more or less the same way).
What drivers are you talking about?
The days when the PC world was a swarm of competing hardware companies are long gone and long forgotten. There 2 video hardware manufacturers left (if we exclude Intel and Via which merged this into their chipset). Apple has used them both and supports both. There are around 3 network card manufacturers left (once again excluding bundles from Via and Intel) - Realtek, Broadcom and Intel (Natsemi, 3Com and AMD are marching full steam ahead into oblivion). Apple used at least 2 of them in MacOS X enabled machines. PCI is PCI regardless of the platform. IDE is IDE regardless of the platform. SCSI support is already there. USB is also already there.
So essentially there is nearly nothing to port as far as all major components of the PC are concerned. So if you look at a PC as shipped by DELL (before you buy 20 different garbage gadgets in the local gadget shop) there are no drivers to write for it. All it takes is to port drivers for the SAME hardware from existing Macs.
It is making money as a result of a large number of people running something that is essentially a business without running it as a business complying with the relevant consumer regulation and very often without paying taxes. The latter is what will drive ebay down back to where it was sooner or later. It is firmly in the sights of the fiscal authorities as well as the consumer watchdogs all over Europe and it is only a matter of time until it is hit by a full broadside under the waterline. Add to that the competition watchdogs which are under a heavy pressure from businesses who sell legally. Add to that customs and excise.
Frankly it is not a company into which I would invest a penny at the moment. They had a solid business case while operating in the US. Moving their business into places with stricter consumer legislation was a bad idea.
I wish I was...
We were buying Compaq. The actual models I am referring to are Prosignia (784MB RAM) - pre-Capellas product, Pressario (first post-Capellas product) - down to 512MB, cheap chinese generic junk motherboard and a shitty noisy fan made in Mexico, followed by Evo (first Carly product) - up to 2-4G RAM, custom motherboard with a correct thermal design.
You may be buying from HPPaq but it is very clear that you are not repairing them.