>Good point, but then why do the LEDs in TFT notebook displays have such horrible lag?
Because they're not LEDs, they're LCDs.;-)
LCDs are a totally different technology. They lag because, well, jeez, I explained this once before but it slips my mind (It's early here! Give me credit! Please!). Basically, it has to do with the fact you're asking a material (crystals) to twist and bend when power is applied; then you take the power off them (or reverse it) to try to force them back to their original position. This takes time.
>If the product is switched, and provides nothing more OR less than the advertised product, then they're perfectly within their rights.
Alright. Let's hash this out then. The Toyota Corolla is made both in Japan and in Canada (also in the US at the NUMMI plant, IIRC).
You are told you'll be receiving a Genuine Japanese Toyota Corolla brand car. You get it, open the glove box, and lo and behold, the tag says "Manufactured in Cambridge, Ontario".
Do you have a case? Obviously. Yes, the car is the same and performs the same, but there are other reasons, some that don't affect performance, that would affect your decision. Perhaps you're Japanese and want to support the local industry?
In the case of this card, perhaps you have some odd hate about ATi producing castrated video CPUs and were trying to avoid paying them money (indirectly) for a product you can't ethically buy. Now you've been duped into dumping money into a product you would never have bought previously.
>About half the people in Canada live in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal.
Why don't you check your latitudes and longitudes there?
Those cities, compared to the top of Canada (North Pole, although that's debated), you only need to traverse about 5% of Canada to get to them from the US border.
>You can say that most Canadians live within 3 hours of the United States, but I ask you this, don't most Americans live along the outside of the U.S.?
Yup. That's because they colonized the nice areas first, of course. Also for defence, I would think. We colonized the borders closest to the US that had *any* amount of water near them. Mostly from the war of 1812, IMHO. How else was Canada expected to fight off the Americans if we didn't set stake on the border towns.
>I don't think that this works out in many cases. Take the comic book. The typical comic costs only around $2.95 in the US. The exact same comic costs $4.50 in Canada.
Comic books are an exception to the rule as producers of American magazines (which, I'm pretty sure covers comic books) destined for Canada have to go through horrendous contortions to convince the Canadian government that they may publish in this country. Either that or they must publish a Canadian version of the exact same magazine, blessed by rules similar to the MAPL for music (I might be off on that one).
The same goes for various other media outlets. Canada is very socialist in what Canadians can and can't see and prices often (but not always -- CDs are an odd exception to this rule) reflect this.
I like to organize by directory. If I'm interested in a certain type of music, Winamp's ability to let me simply import a directory into the playlist and intelligently deal with it is absolutely excellent. I also like WinAmp's ability to estimate how much music I have (I never tried this in iTunes, it didn't last long enough on my system to find out).
iTunes lack of a "Play this one file now" capability was disappointing also. I also had a difficult time figuring out exactly how to get it into a WinAmp/WiMP-style "miniplayer" mode.
Then there's all the other "crapware" it installs along with itself, some of it particularly annoying, like it's iPod detection and QuickTime software, which loads on boot (none of my other MP3 players do that -- except WinAmp, which gives you the option for it *not* to do that on installation).
Let's just say after experiencing the above, along with the difficult to read interface (Why not use the windows interface? Microsoft spent millions on finding out exactly what colours/icons work best for everyone.), I got rid of it ultra-fast. It felt a lot like one of those VisualBasic programs where the programmer just learned about the ability to use their own custom widgets rather than stick with simple windows widgets (and keep the executable size way down). Winamp suffers from this problem also, but isn't a 10 MB download...
As you can see, from all of that, I'm not much of a guy for "drag 'n drop". That always feels like the "cheap" way out -- something that's overused far too much, and generally isn't implemented well at all. I simply feel that if a media player doesn't offer a simple "Open Song" feature, it's lacking something.
Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. However, as this is Apple's fist attempt at porting an MP3 player to the windows platform, I'll cut them some slack and try out the next version, when it's available. Hopefully they will have gotten rid of the "grey on grey" theme and made it readable.
>But if we did, and they cut us off, we couldn't take them to court. We wouldn't have a leg to stand on. The contract says, specifically, that either party has the right to terminate service at any time for any reason.
True, but you would have a leg to stand on (oh that overused cliche) if they refused to refund the last month and any money for pre-paid service. Most ISPs that suck this bad also won't refund money, which makes them a ripe target for a cheap small claims suit.
>Curious: exactly how large is your music collection?
Well, I have an MP3 CD player. It's now around 300 - 400 CDs (I lost count after filling a few 96 CD cases). There's a lot of people like me who have downloaded that much music simply by keeping up with their favourite usenet MP3 group (I personally enjoy alt.binaries.mp3.dance).
The largest benefit of using a CD is that I can easily let anyone in my vicinity make a copy of, and enjoy, whatever music I have on me. Pretty much everyone has access to a computer with a CD drive. Not everyone had a Mac (when players like the iPod were Mac only), or, nowadays, not everyone wants to load special software just to download a few songs.
I suppose the biggest benefit of it all is that compared to any of the USB 1.1 players out there, burning a CD is WAY faster than uploading music.:-)
>In any case, I'm a lazy ass, and creating a playlist is easier than burning a CD.
I dunno. If you're talking about software like iTunes, I'd have to say the opposite. What a horrid software that was! (shivers) Now, playlists in software like WinAmp, I'm all over that... but I don't know of any hard drive based players that support functions like that.
>Reduce the copy by 75% or enlarge it by 150% and by US law at least, you're fine
Well, as far as this goes, I don't know if the colour copiers care about US law when copying bills. Do they start copying properly again if the bill is enlarged/reduced? And what about when the person doing the copy forgets to set that?
I'm surprised there's no allowance in the law for printing on an obviously "fake" colour of paper, say, hot pink, for example.
Unfortunately yes. And it sucks. You need a reason to copy money? How's about I give you a huge one (that's actually in use by one of our suppliers):
To prevent them from having to deal with counterfeit bills, our supplier photocopies your license along with the bills you hand them. That way they quickly get the serial number off the bills, and proof you handed them to them, in a neat little package.
Fortunately, they have a very old black and white copier. As colour copiers get cheaper and eventually completely replace black and white copiers, this procedure will become outlawed defacto. And that's wrong.
(No, the bills aren't usable. They only copy one side.)
>_This_ is usually interpreted as underlining, where I come from.
And where I come from, underlining is the typesetting/typewriting method for indicating italics (Sometimes I *am* happy I read mom's old typewriting lessons book and used the old manual typewriter'(bksp).)
Natch.
>If it's not the real thing, it's open to (mis)interpretation
How? By people who don't know history? Yes, it's a bummer when someone doesn't know history. But I don't fault myself for that. I don't necessarialy fault you for that, but do hope that in the future you spread that fact around.;-) Also, hopefully, new students at school are being taught the history of the devices they're using!
>I've had unsavvy friends who asked if their computer was broken since they were getting garbage characters at the end of many of my sentences.;)
If your phone company bills the government for a tap (they can sometimes) check your bill carefully. If it's anything like Canada, this may screw up the taxes (clearly, the wiretapping charge won't appear on the bill, but the computer may forget to deduct the charge from the taxes portion of the bill as they did for Canada).
As a small startup doing exactly the same thing (check my URL), it's very good. I've dealt with #1, #4, and #5 already, but didn't even think about #2 or #3. If you're feeling generous, I'd love to chat with someone who has been in the business before.
And yes, the 5% profit margins are 100% correct. That's why I sell so many other items (and I *loathe* the customers that want 1 hour of phone tech support to drag and drop items to Nero Express).
>They are REQUIRED BY LAW to pay at least $6.75. Let me explain this to you again since you didn't get it the first time
Okay. Perhaps you're not catching my drift. I'm an employer. I pay my employees $2.13 an hour (ie: That's the amount of money my books show exits my company to land in their pocket books). The excess really has nothing to do with me. I pay them $2.13 an hour because that's what minimum wage says.
Now, bear with me for a moment. My restaurant hits hard times. The customers go away (maybe the food is poisoned, whatever). All of a sudden, the government tells me I have to make up for the lost tips, despite the fact that the company is already losing money.
What is the obvious conclusion to this tale? Everyone loses their jobs and the company goes out of business. You can't tell me a company used to paying workers $2.13 an hour can all of a sudden cough up 2.17 times the money. How do I know that? I run a business, and if I tried to pay myself double the wages during a downturn, I'd simply go bankrupt.
So, simply, if a business chooses, it never has to pay more than $2.13 an hour to its workers, except perhaps on the last month it's in business.
So, from an employer's perspective, the pay per hour is $2.13. That's all the employer ever really needs to worry about. From the employees' perspective it's more, but that can be said about a lot of jobs with unlisted benefits (Oooo! Let's raid the supplies cabinet!).
>They often do. Chinese labor laws, while on the books, are for the most part not enforced. Here's another article, from the Washington Post.. (Mirrored elsewhere, the Post charges money for archived stories beyond 2 weeks).
That's interesting. I have alternate information showing that if one does lodge a dispute under this law the company only has a 15% chance of winning, and that 50% (or more) of the time the employee wins outright.
Perhaps workers are simply uninformed of their rights? If so, we should work to educate the Chinese of the rights given to them by their government.
Then again, perhaps we should look closely at some quotes from those articles:
In many instances, factories have corrected faults found by inspectors
Sounds great to me!
Violations found in the reports ranged from inadequate pay to failure to provide proper hearing protection
The second being a nuisance many crappy workplaces have had problems with (try being a part time worker in even North America and getting "safety equipment" provided to you), and the first being an oddity since China, as a country, lacks a national minimum wage.
An Adidas factory in El Salvador switched to a voluntary overtime program after inspectors found it was forcing workers to work more than eight hours a day
That doesn't sound very ominous to me.
These new workers are younger, poorer, and less familiar with the promises of labor rights and job security that once served as the ideological bedrock of the ruling Communist Party. Few residents can read a newspaper, and fewer still speak the national language, Mandarin. Residents say there is only one way to survive: Pull the children out of school, and later send them to find work in faraway cities.
Yeah, pretty much backs up what I'm saying. It's dissappointing to see a lack of education being the downfall, but such things have happened in first world countries too, sadly (look at migrant workers in the US, for example).
It's sad, really, it is. But education has always been the government's job, in China, and pretty much anywhere else. Not a factory's job.
It sucks even worse when a family forces a child out of education to work illegally.
The answer here is education. Education on what their government protects them with.
Inside, life followed a rigid routine, co-workers said. Li w
>Uh, yes they are, it's called THE LAW. Easy to prove if they don't too, with IRS records and all.
It's called "Going out of business" and "layoffs". Easy to do when you can prove you can't afford to pay workers anymore, what with accounting and all.
>Globalising companies are not expanding to the third world to "send much needed money into the country"
True.
>They are looking to exploit the quality-of-life and legislative differential between 1st and 3rd world countries.
False. Why do I have to explain Chinese Labour Law to everyone here? No, Chinese law doesn't allow for 16 hour days (Article 36), 12 year old workers (Article 15), forced labour(Article 56) and 5 cents an hour (well, in general there is no minimum wage there, but it'd be a rare sight to find a 5 cent an hour worker).
They may be exploiting the quality of life there, but, as a massive choice, people there have chosen to work at factories than work on farms. The question nobody who wants to denounce globalisation ever wants to ask is Why? Why did they choose to work at a factory than work where they did before? Why? Chinese factories do not go to cities with guns and tell people to work or die. They offer a certain compensation for labour, and people choose to accept it.
>Corporations don't like anti-exploitation, safety laws, environmental protection laws -- it cuts potential profits.
True. However, as a generalisation, most people find a lot to dislike about many laws. So this is really applicable to all, not just corporations.
>Corporations only exist and only work towards making a profit for their owners. That is all they do. Ethics do not come into it.
True.
>All ethical behaviour has to come from: >a) the people who directly control the corporation >b) the people who control the environment of the corporation (i.e. the government)
False. You are missing c:
c) The employees working for the corporation.
The Chinese aren't the mindless automatons you may think they are. They have brains. They can reason their way out of situations they aren't happy with. There are no guns held to heads at Chinese factories.
>If you live in a 3rd world country, the only way your life will get better when the factory comes is if those in charge (your government, elected or not) demand support for you as a condition of building the factory.
Yes and no. But I'll take that and run with it:
Life certainly wasn't getting any better before the factory, so if you're suggesting it could, at all, possibly, get better because of the factory, so be it.
>If a government does not demand that corporation build houses, schools and hospitals as part of the factory deal, the corporation won't do it.
False. I'd provide a bunch more links, but I think you can clearly see what you're saying isn't true.
>It's not a charity.
True. Companies will build the hospitals, schools, etc, if they feel they can benefit from it. That's where your wallet (ie: vote) comes into play.
>The problem some third world countries are having is that they are run by tinpot dictators who will let the corporations rape and pillage their fertile lands as long as the corporation gives them a backhander or builds them a new mansion.
Now that is true, and I won't disagree.
However, only the people can fix that problem. No amount of money, wether it be a lack of it, or too much, is going to change that. If every country all of a sudden chose to quit buying Chinese tomorrow, China would not suddenly become a democracy.
>So yes, in either case, the minimum wage in this state is $6.75, and it's not the highest in the country either.
That's if you include reliance on donations to keep your job (an employer used to paying $2.13 an hour is not suddenly going to drop their pants and pay you thrice that if business levels). I personally don't count those, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
>The minimum wage in China that you're referring to, is only for ONE CITY. A major city. Not even its suburbs
I can find more. It isn't hard. I have personal examples. My business partner once worked in a slave labour clothing factory. He made about 25 cents an hour a decade ago. Ask about. I think you'll find this isn't uncommon. Heck, even biased sources admit a Chinese worker makes $52.50 monthly (using your numbers). The facts I present are the truth, much as some feel hard pressed to admit.
>A typical Chinese workweek exceeds 60 hours and often will exceed 80
The PRC's Labour Law requires that the daily working hours of employees shall not exceed eight hours and the average working hours in a week shall not exceed 44 hours. Employees are also to have at least one rest day per week.
Sorry, you won't be successfull at convincing me the typical Chinese company operates above Chinese law. China is all about enforcement of its laws in any way necessary.
>But that aside, the fact remains that there are no child labor laws
According to Article 15 of the Chinese Labour Law, employers are not allowed to hire underage workers - workers below the age of 16.
I know there are many groups that are spouting these lies. An infamous man once said, if you tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. Sadly, when it comes to China and labour laws, we've made that adage itself true.
>I'm not saying we should stop buying Chinese products totally. But we need to end these unfair (and illegal) trade and labor practices. We can't compete with that. No one can.
Who wants to? Nobody wants to go through the industrial revolution again. Everyone has to once. That's life. Nobody can appreciate the good without the bad.
I also agree, end the illegal labour practices. Encourage China to prosecute companies that refuse to abide by Chinese law. Then again, that should be obvious!:-)
>This is a forumla for making the rich richer and the poor poorer in the long run.
I won't disagree with your argument at all (it's very correct), except this point.
Doesn't it seem obvious that this is a formula for improvement? The "bottom" will always get higher. Heck, look at minimum wage. Most people measure minimum wage for Chinese workers in cents. Imagine getting paid like that at the start of the industrial revolution in the US! You'd be a tycoon!
As these manufacturers look for cheaper wages, the bottom will rise. The fact is that in life there is always a bottom and a top (unless you live in a communist country, like Cuba, and even then that's not at all true). That's the way things go. The best you can do is improve living for the bottom while you improve living for yourself.
That's what this formula does. When China unionizes, it will be *because* of this formula. Other countries a little slow on the start of the revolution have already been forced to improve workers rights, for example, look at Japan. This formula will be what forced China to get workers rights. Without this formula that would never have happened! And then, the next country it "preys" on will benefit. And then another, and another, and so on. The amazing synergy continues.
It really is a miraculous system, when you think about it.
>There is no comparison. The parts are the same, but the design of the machines is completely different.
How? What are we talking about in difference, space age style difference, or "they make the circuit board a different shape and put the holes in different places, also a few chips are a little different" difference?
I can tell you for a fact making a wireless router with a circular circuit board or a rectangular one really won't make any difference to operation (although the circular one was probably a real bitch to design), for example.
Slashdot Mirror
>In long, you're a bit too tight assed... It's a joke, Mortimer :)
:-)
Ok, ok.
Try adding a smiley next time -- it might keep people who have boring day jobs (like me) from replying.
>And the money in that pocket came from which job salary?
It's incredibly unfair to expect someone paid with public OR private money to spend that money the way you want.
How would you like your company president to tell you how your own money should be spent?
In short, you're not his mother.
>Good point, but then why do the LEDs in TFT notebook displays have such horrible lag?
;-)
Because they're not LEDs, they're LCDs.
LCDs are a totally different technology. They lag because, well, jeez, I explained this once before but it slips my mind (It's early here! Give me credit! Please!). Basically, it has to do with the fact you're asking a material (crystals) to twist and bend when power is applied; then you take the power off them (or reverse it) to try to force them back to their original position. This takes time.
>Why are people complaining anyway?
Because HP forgot to add something simple.
"Includes Radeon 9200 Mobility brand, super duper 2000 motherboard, 10,000x AGP, 10 MegaWatt (PMPO) speakers, etc, etc*"
* or compatible parts
Look! Now you can use ANY parts you like, as long as they work similar, and nobody can bitch.
Why is it someone like me, without legal experience, has to tell their legal department how to operate?
Adding this should be obvious to anyone.
>If the product is switched, and provides nothing more OR less than the advertised product, then they're perfectly within their rights.
Alright. Let's hash this out then. The Toyota Corolla is made both in Japan and in Canada (also in the US at the NUMMI plant, IIRC).
You are told you'll be receiving a Genuine Japanese Toyota Corolla brand car. You get it, open the glove box, and lo and behold, the tag says "Manufactured in Cambridge, Ontario".
Do you have a case? Obviously. Yes, the car is the same and performs the same, but there are other reasons, some that don't affect performance, that would affect your decision. Perhaps you're Japanese and want to support the local industry?
In the case of this card, perhaps you have some odd hate about ATi producing castrated video CPUs and were trying to avoid paying them money (indirectly) for a product you can't ethically buy. Now you've been duped into dumping money into a product you would never have bought previously.
>With a full wave recrifier, it will be off for tiny amount of time between pulses; almost certainly faster than the LED can turn off
:-)
Considering LEDs are used in TOSLINK circuits (and heck, gigabit fibre circuit), I really hope that isn't true!
An LED should shut off nearly instantly. I mean, how can one expect it to stay on but the rectifier diodes to turn off?
>Also, the human eye can't detect a 120Hz flicker, the limit is around 48Hz
Directly, yes. Indirectly, the debate is still out there.
>With 4 diodes (at a few cents each) you can build a full wave rectifier that will let you connect an LED to AC power without flicker.
It'll still flicker at 120 Hz without a filter capacitor!
>About half the people in Canada live in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal.
Why don't you check your latitudes and longitudes there?
Those cities, compared to the top of Canada (North Pole, although that's debated), you only need to traverse about 5% of Canada to get to them from the US border.
>You can say that most Canadians live within 3 hours of the United States, but I ask you this, don't most Americans live along the outside of the U.S.?
Yup. That's because they colonized the nice areas first, of course. Also for defence, I would think. We colonized the borders closest to the US that had *any* amount of water near them. Mostly from the war of 1812, IMHO. How else was Canada expected to fight off the Americans if we didn't set stake on the border towns.
>I don't think that this works out in many cases. Take the comic book. The typical comic costs only around $2.95 in the US. The exact same comic costs $4.50 in Canada.
Comic books are an exception to the rule as producers of American magazines (which, I'm pretty sure covers comic books) destined for Canada have to go through horrendous contortions to convince the Canadian government that they may publish in this country. Either that or they must publish a Canadian version of the exact same magazine, blessed by rules similar to the MAPL for music (I might be off on that one).
The same goes for various other media outlets. Canada is very socialist in what Canadians can and can't see and prices often (but not always -- CDs are an odd exception to this rule) reflect this.
>What do you find difficult about it?
I like to organize by directory. If I'm interested in a certain type of music, Winamp's ability to let me simply import a directory into the playlist and intelligently deal with it is absolutely excellent. I also like WinAmp's ability to estimate how much music I have (I never tried this in iTunes, it didn't last long enough on my system to find out).
iTunes lack of a "Play this one file now" capability was disappointing also. I also had a difficult time figuring out exactly how to get it into a WinAmp/WiMP-style "miniplayer" mode.
Then there's all the other "crapware" it installs along with itself, some of it particularly annoying, like it's iPod detection and QuickTime software, which loads on boot (none of my other MP3 players do that -- except WinAmp, which gives you the option for it *not* to do that on installation).
Let's just say after experiencing the above, along with the difficult to read interface (Why not use the windows interface? Microsoft spent millions on finding out exactly what colours/icons work best for everyone.), I got rid of it ultra-fast. It felt a lot like one of those VisualBasic programs where the programmer just learned about the ability to use their own custom widgets rather than stick with simple windows widgets (and keep the executable size way down). Winamp suffers from this problem also, but isn't a 10 MB download...
As you can see, from all of that, I'm not much of a guy for "drag 'n drop". That always feels like the "cheap" way out -- something that's overused far too much, and generally isn't implemented well at all. I simply feel that if a media player doesn't offer a simple "Open Song" feature, it's lacking something.
Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. However, as this is Apple's fist attempt at porting an MP3 player to the windows platform, I'll cut them some slack and try out the next version, when it's available. Hopefully they will have gotten rid of the "grey on grey" theme and made it readable.
>But if we did, and they cut us off, we couldn't take them to court. We wouldn't have a leg to stand on. The contract says, specifically, that either party has the right to terminate service at any time for any reason.
True, but you would have a leg to stand on (oh that overused cliche) if they refused to refund the last month and any money for pre-paid service. Most ISPs that suck this bad also won't refund money, which makes them a ripe target for a cheap small claims suit.
>Curious: exactly how large is your music collection?
:-)
Well, I have an MP3 CD player. It's now around 300 - 400 CDs (I lost count after filling a few 96 CD cases). There's a lot of people like me who have downloaded that much music simply by keeping up with their favourite usenet MP3 group (I personally enjoy alt.binaries.mp3.dance).
The largest benefit of using a CD is that I can easily let anyone in my vicinity make a copy of, and enjoy, whatever music I have on me. Pretty much everyone has access to a computer with a CD drive. Not everyone had a Mac (when players like the iPod were Mac only), or, nowadays, not everyone wants to load special software just to download a few songs.
I suppose the biggest benefit of it all is that compared to any of the USB 1.1 players out there, burning a CD is WAY faster than uploading music.
>In any case, I'm a lazy ass, and creating a playlist is easier than burning a CD.
I dunno. If you're talking about software like iTunes, I'd have to say the opposite. What a horrid software that was! (shivers) Now, playlists in software like WinAmp, I'm all over that... but I don't know of any hard drive based players that support functions like that.
>Reduce the copy by 75% or enlarge it by 150% and by US law at least, you're fine
Well, as far as this goes, I don't know if the colour copiers care about US law when copying bills. Do they start copying properly again if the bill is enlarged/reduced? And what about when the person doing the copy forgets to set that?
I'm surprised there's no allowance in the law for printing on an obviously "fake" colour of paper, say, hot pink, for example.
Unfortunately yes. And it sucks. You need a reason to copy money? How's about I give you a huge one (that's actually in use by one of our suppliers):
To prevent them from having to deal with counterfeit bills, our supplier photocopies your license along with the bills you hand them. That way they quickly get the serial number off the bills, and proof you handed them to them, in a neat little package.
Fortunately, they have a very old black and white copier. As colour copiers get cheaper and eventually completely replace black and white copiers, this procedure will become outlawed defacto. And that's wrong.
(No, the bills aren't usable. They only copy one side.)
>_This_ is usually interpreted as underlining, where I come from.
;-) Also, hopefully, new students at school are being taught the history of the devices they're using!
;)
And where I come from, underlining is the typesetting/typewriting method for indicating italics (Sometimes I *am* happy I read mom's old typewriting lessons book and used the old manual typewriter'(bksp).)
Natch.
>If it's not the real thing, it's open to (mis)interpretation
How? By people who don't know history? Yes, it's a bummer when someone doesn't know history. But I don't fault myself for that. I don't necessarialy fault you for that, but do hope that in the future you spread that fact around.
>I've had unsavvy friends who asked if their computer was broken since they were getting garbage characters at the end of many of my sentences.
Heh. ^_^ (See what they say about that one!)
Interesting fact:
:-)
If your phone company bills the government for a tap (they can sometimes) check your bill carefully. If it's anything like Canada, this may screw up the taxes (clearly, the wiretapping charge won't appear on the bill, but the computer may forget to deduct the charge from the taxes portion of the bill as they did for Canada).
Just thought you might find it interesting.
>HTML actually comes in handy as many clients now use it for text formatting such as bold, italics, or bulleted items.
:-)
Sure...
*Nobody* could _ever_:
* Do
* That
* Before!
Also, another example (which I am now using) is VDR.
Fortunately, being open source, you can always keep using/improving it (although if it does break patent laws, you're not really allowed to).
Thanks for the advice!
As a small startup doing exactly the same thing (check my URL), it's very good. I've dealt with #1, #4, and #5 already, but didn't even think about #2 or #3. If you're feeling generous, I'd love to chat with someone who has been in the business before.
And yes, the 5% profit margins are 100% correct. That's why I sell so many other items (and I *loathe* the customers that want 1 hour of phone tech support to drag and drop items to Nero Express).
>They are REQUIRED BY LAW to pay at least $6.75. Let me explain this to you again since you didn't get it the first time
Okay. Perhaps you're not catching my drift. I'm an employer. I pay my employees $2.13 an hour (ie: That's the amount of money my books show exits my company to land in their pocket books). The excess really has nothing to do with me. I pay them $2.13 an hour because that's what minimum wage says.
Now, bear with me for a moment. My restaurant hits hard times. The customers go away (maybe the food is poisoned, whatever). All of a sudden, the government tells me I have to make up for the lost tips, despite the fact that the company is already losing money.
What is the obvious conclusion to this tale? Everyone loses their jobs and the company goes out of business. You can't tell me a company used to paying workers $2.13 an hour can all of a sudden cough up 2.17 times the money. How do I know that? I run a business, and if I tried to pay myself double the wages during a downturn, I'd simply go bankrupt.
So, simply, if a business chooses, it never has to pay more than $2.13 an hour to its workers, except perhaps on the last month it's in business.
So, from an employer's perspective, the pay per hour is $2.13. That's all the employer ever really needs to worry about. From the employees' perspective it's more, but that can be said about a lot of jobs with unlisted benefits (Oooo! Let's raid the supplies cabinet!).
>They often do. Chinese labor laws, while on the books, are for the most part not enforced. Here's another article, from the Washington Post.. (Mirrored elsewhere, the Post charges money for archived stories beyond 2 weeks).
That's interesting. I have alternate information showing that if one does lodge a dispute under this law the company only has a 15% chance of winning, and that 50% (or more) of the time the employee wins outright.
Perhaps workers are simply uninformed of their rights? If so, we should work to educate the Chinese of the rights given to them by their government.
Then again, perhaps we should look closely at some quotes from those articles:
In many instances, factories have corrected faults found by inspectors
Sounds great to me!
Violations found in the reports ranged from inadequate pay to failure to provide proper hearing protection
The second being a nuisance many crappy workplaces have had problems with (try being a part time worker in even North America and getting "safety equipment" provided to you), and the first being an oddity since China, as a country, lacks a national minimum wage.
An Adidas factory in El Salvador switched to a voluntary overtime program after inspectors found it was forcing workers to work more than eight hours a day
That doesn't sound very ominous to me.
These new workers are younger, poorer, and less familiar with the promises of labor rights and job security that once served as the ideological bedrock of the ruling Communist Party.
Few residents can read a newspaper, and fewer still speak the national language, Mandarin.
Residents say there is only one way to survive: Pull the children out of school, and later send them to find work in faraway cities.
Yeah, pretty much backs up what I'm saying. It's dissappointing to see a lack of education being the downfall, but such things have happened in first world countries too, sadly (look at migrant workers in the US, for example).
It's sad, really, it is. But education has always been the government's job, in China, and pretty much anywhere else. Not a factory's job.
It sucks even worse when a family forces a child out of education to work illegally.
The answer here is education. Education on what their government protects them with.
Inside, life followed a rigid routine, co-workers said. Li w
>Uh, yes they are, it's called THE LAW. Easy to prove if they don't too, with IRS records and all.
It's called "Going out of business" and "layoffs". Easy to do when you can prove you can't afford to pay workers anymore, what with accounting and all.
>Globalising companies are not expanding to the third world to "send much needed money into the country"
True.
>They are looking to exploit the quality-of-life and legislative differential between 1st and 3rd world countries.
False. Why do I have to explain Chinese Labour Law to everyone here? No, Chinese law doesn't allow for 16 hour days (Article 36), 12 year old workers (Article 15), forced labour(Article 56) and 5 cents an hour (well, in general there is no minimum wage there, but it'd be a rare sight to find a 5 cent an hour worker).
They may be exploiting the quality of life there, but, as a massive choice, people there have chosen to work at factories than work on farms. The question nobody who wants to denounce globalisation ever wants to ask is Why? Why did they choose to work at a factory than work where they did before? Why? Chinese factories do not go to cities with guns and tell people to work or die. They offer a certain compensation for labour, and people choose to accept it.
>Corporations don't like anti-exploitation, safety laws, environmental protection laws -- it cuts potential profits.
True. However, as a generalisation, most people find a lot to dislike about many laws. So this is really applicable to all, not just corporations.
>Corporations only exist and only work towards making a profit for their owners. That is all they do. Ethics do not come into it.
True.
>All ethical behaviour has to come from:
>a) the people who directly control the corporation
>b) the people who control the environment of the corporation (i.e. the government)
False. You are missing c:
c) The employees working for the corporation.
The Chinese aren't the mindless automatons you may think they are. They have brains. They can reason their way out of situations they aren't happy with. There are no guns held to heads at Chinese factories.
>If you live in a 3rd world country, the only way your life will get better when the factory comes is if those in charge (your government, elected or not) demand support for you as a condition of building the factory.
Yes and no. But I'll take that and run with it:
Life certainly wasn't getting any better before the factory, so if you're suggesting it could, at all, possibly, get better because of the factory, so be it.
>If a government does not demand that corporation build houses, schools and hospitals as part of the factory deal, the corporation won't do it.
False. I'd provide a bunch more links, but I think you can clearly see what you're saying isn't true.
>It's not a charity.
True. Companies will build the hospitals, schools, etc, if they feel they can benefit from it. That's where your wallet (ie: vote) comes into play.
>The problem some third world countries are having is that they are run by tinpot dictators who will let the corporations rape and pillage their fertile lands as long as the corporation gives them a backhander or builds them a new mansion.
Now that is true, and I won't disagree.
However, only the people can fix that problem. No amount of money, wether it be a lack of it, or too much, is going to change that. If every country all of a sudden chose to quit buying Chinese tomorrow, China would not suddenly become a democracy.
>So yes, in either case, the minimum wage in this state is $6.75, and it's not the highest in the country either.
:-)
That's if you include reliance on donations to keep your job (an employer used to paying $2.13 an hour is not suddenly going to drop their pants and pay you thrice that if business levels). I personally don't count those, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
>The minimum wage in China that you're referring to, is only for ONE CITY. A major city. Not even its suburbs
I can find more. It isn't hard. I have personal examples. My business partner once worked in a slave labour clothing factory. He made about 25 cents an hour a decade ago. Ask about. I think you'll find this isn't uncommon. Heck, even biased sources admit a Chinese worker makes $52.50 monthly (using your numbers). The facts I present are the truth, much as some feel hard pressed to admit.
>A typical Chinese workweek exceeds 60 hours and often will exceed 80
Then the typical Chinese company operates outside the law.
The PRC's Labour Law requires that the daily working hours of employees shall not exceed eight hours and the average working hours in a week shall not exceed 44 hours. Employees are also to have at least one rest day per week.
Sorry, you won't be successfull at convincing me the typical Chinese company operates above Chinese law. China is all about enforcement of its laws in any way necessary.
>But that aside, the fact remains that there are no child labor laws
False.
According to Article 15 of the Chinese Labour Law, employers are not allowed to hire underage workers - workers below the age of 16.
I know there are many groups that are spouting these lies. An infamous man once said, if you tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. Sadly, when it comes to China and labour laws, we've made that adage itself true.
>I'm not saying we should stop buying Chinese products totally. But we need to end these unfair (and illegal) trade and labor practices. We can't compete with that. No one can.
Who wants to? Nobody wants to go through the industrial revolution again. Everyone has to once. That's life. Nobody can appreciate the good without the bad.
I also agree, end the illegal labour practices. Encourage China to prosecute companies that refuse to abide by Chinese law. Then again, that should be obvious!
>This is a forumla for making the rich richer and the poor poorer in the long run.
I won't disagree with your argument at all (it's very correct), except this point.
Doesn't it seem obvious that this is a formula for improvement? The "bottom" will always get higher. Heck, look at minimum wage. Most people measure minimum wage for Chinese workers in cents. Imagine getting paid like that at the start of the industrial revolution in the US! You'd be a tycoon!
As these manufacturers look for cheaper wages, the bottom will rise. The fact is that in life there is always a bottom and a top (unless you live in a communist country, like Cuba, and even then that's not at all true). That's the way things go. The best you can do is improve living for the bottom while you improve living for yourself.
That's what this formula does. When China unionizes, it will be *because* of this formula. Other countries a little slow on the start of the revolution have already been forced to improve workers rights, for example, look at Japan. This formula will be what forced China to get workers rights. Without this formula that would never have happened! And then, the next country it "preys" on will benefit. And then another, and another, and so on. The amazing synergy continues.
It really is a miraculous system, when you think about it.
>There is no comparison. The parts are the same, but the design of the machines is completely different.
How? What are we talking about in difference, space age style difference, or "they make the circuit board a different shape and put the holes in different places, also a few chips are a little different" difference?
I can tell you for a fact making a wireless router with a circular circuit board or a rectangular one really won't make any difference to operation (although the circular one was probably a real bitch to design), for example.
>Dell - cheap plastic
>Apple - anodized aluminum alloy
Ahh, there's your problem. How about comparing a quality laptop to the Apple?
Apple doesn't have a coup on case materials (or cool designs!), you know.