In fact, VAT is a little different from Sales Tax.
The way VAT on new manufactured goods is supposed to work is that the company that makes the product charges VAT on it, but they reclaim the VAT on the pieces used to make the product (or it's not charged in the first place).
So even in the worst case where (say) company A makes a motherboard, ships it to company B who add a case and sell it as a barebones kit to company C, who custom build a computer and sell it to the end user, the computer has only been taxed once.
So if you're some guy in the UK selling custom-built PCs on eBay, yes, the EU expects you to charge VAT on the sale, and then claim back any VAT you paid when you bought the parts.
That's a highly simplified explanation, in fact. I used to write accounting software for a living, and European VAT regulations are comparable to the US tax code in their complexity. Drafted by a committee of dunces with no regard for how difficult they will be for the poor sap who has to implement them, and concerned only with ensuring that the right government bodies get their piece of the cash, and the right business donors get the appropriate preferential treatment.
How it all applies to someone not in the EU at all, I don't know. It'll be fascinating to find out.
When I lived in the UK, for a while I used to keep a "top ten rip-offs" list of Mac software that was outrageously overpriced in the UK compared to the US. Often no localization had been done; it was exactly the same software. I'd get a UK and a US MacWarehouse catalog, plug the numbers into a little Hypercard database, and it would spit out a Usenet posting. The idea was to try and shame some of the developers into moving to less crooked distributors.
Aladdin software actually wrote to me about how it wasn't their doing, and that there were basically two or three big software distributors in the UK who all overcharged by outrageous amounts. (In other words, most likely a cartel.) Still, there was wide variation in markup, from a few percent to totally obscene.
As I recall, the reigning champion was Dave Winer's Userland, whose UK markup was over 200%. It was cheaper to fly to New York and buy a copy than to buy it in the UK.
Things aren't as outrageous in the UK these days. I priced up building a computer for my family last month, and it turned out that buying the parts in the UK was no more expensive than buying in the US and shipping them the finished computer. Which is still bad, but not I-can't-believe-it bad.
Microsoft used to publish scary statistics stating that there was massive piracy of their software in the UK compared to the US. Well, the reason for that is they simply counted how many people were running Word (via surveys), counted number of sales through official channels in each country, and hey presto...
What they missed is that nobody I knew--literally nobody--bought their software from UK sources. Everyone would mail order from the US. So the apparent piracy rate in the UK would rise, and the apparent piracy rate in the US would drop.
Makes me wonder about the basis for similar statistics we see bandied about these days.
There's a difference between "native methods" which are part of the Java platform, and ones which are not. Are you suggesting that this application is 100% Pure Java?
Firstly, I use Windows 2000 at work, and it isn't anything like as stable as Linux.
Secondly, they don't want to pay for Windows 2000, and I'm sure as hell not buying them a copy.
There's a menu just like the Windows start menu, you open Netscape and it's just like Netscape on Windows, and so on. I somehow doubt that the navigation issues are going to be insurmountable. My mother never even mastered use of styles in Word, so it's not like they have extensive experience they'll be losing in the switch.
You also seem very unclear on what the word 'hypocritical' means.
You think that's stupid? An INS goon told me I had to write both names as my signature on a form I was filing. I pointed out that my signature was one word, and was on every other piece of paperwork already, as well as all my credit cards, ID cards, passport, and so on. I also pointed out that it would mean the signature on that piece of paperwork wouldn't match any of the others. Still he insisted. So I signed my name normally, then wrote the family name out afterwards in non-cursive script, since (as mentioned in another reply) I can't write cursive any more.
I wonder if this posting will be allowed as evidence of proper intent if the FBI come after me for "forging" a fake signature?
Children are taught to write making only downstrokes? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. The American educational system continues to amaze me.
One summer when I was around 14 I redesigned my own handwriting from scratch. Inspired by the bauhaus design school, I worked out an optimal set of upper and lower case letterforms. The idea was to make every symbol unambiguous, so I adopted European-style crossed 7s and Zs, '1' and 'l' were distinguishable, and so on. This later helped a huge amount in mathematics and physics.
Next I worked out the easiest way to write each symbol in a small number of strokes. So an "A" is two strokes, an "N" is one stroke, and so on.
Then over the summer vacation, I practiced. By the time school started again, I was pretty much up to the speed I used to be able to achieve via cursive lettering. I switched to my new handwriting at school, and refused to go back. The teachers didn't mind too much because it was easier for them to read and mark my work.
Twenty years later, I cannot remember how to write cursive script at all, except for my one-word signature. If I'm in a real hurry, I can partially join some adjacent letters to increase speed at the expense of legibility, but it's rare I have to write something that quickly.
Obviously designing your own bauhaus-inspired handwriting system is exceptionally geeky, downright obsessive even, but the point is there's nothing inherently slow or ugly about non-cursive handwriting.
Another unexpected benefit was that my handwriting turned out to be incredibly easy for the Newton printed recognizer to read. I got better accuracy on the Newton that I've ever managed to get from Graffiti on the Palm.
It may be mostly written in Java, but it's calling a buttload of native code to do the actual work. Don't believe me? Disable native methods in your VM and see how far it gets.
So let's try to keep the hype under perspective. What we really have here is a demonstration that Java is fast enough to handle the game logic, and maybe the 3D calculations, of a 3D game that isn't playable, all at a fraction of the speed of Objective-C. Oh, I'm so impressed.
The problem with Jabber used to be that it didn't work. This article has inspired me to give it another try, and I'm glad to say it does now work, so I'm going to try using it for a while.
There's still a big problem that'll get in the way of user acceptance, however: it's extremely complicated. Some of the complication is unavoidable, in that you have a multi-server system with gateways to multiple external protocols. However, some of the issues are just down to the fact that it's a system where the clients are currently being designed and built by hackers, for hackers.
What is a message queue? Why do I need to care about it? I've never seen any other IM client that expected me to deal with such a thing. "Close the event window going to compressed mode"? Uh, whatever.
"Custom presence entries"? WTF is that, presence of people who don't exist? "Synchronize presence with multiple copies"--uh, why would I want that, in case I have multiple personalities? I just want to log on from wherever I am and have it work.
I'm not trying to be picky here. I'm a computer scientist. If this thing isn't blatantly obvious to me without looking at the documentation, there is zero, I repeat, zero chance that my mother and my arts graduate friends will be able to deal with it.
My less-technically-inclined parents are begging me to put Linux on their computer.
Why?
Because their Windows system has hosed itself or been wiped out by viruses and trojan horses four times in the last year or two. Every time they get it all working again, suddenly they have an infestation of pop-up penis enlargement ads, or everyone they know starts getting e-mailed virus file attachments. Even when Windows is not obviously hosed, it tends to crash and otherwise behave erratically, because they're not technically astute, so they don't know how to tune Windows to be reliable.
They only use the computer for e-mail, web, word processing, spreadsheet, and other simple tasks that can easily be handled with open source software. They only occasionally need to exchange documents with other people, and OpenOffice's compatibility will be fine for that purpose.
What they want is a computer that's reliable--both in the sense of not crashing, and in the sense of continuing to work without being reinstalled every six months. Not having to pay Microsoft annual fees is merely a bonus.
So I'm gonna give 'em Xandros, just on the off chance that they really do still need one or two pieces of Windows software. If they don't, they've got a Debian system, so it's all good. I'll set up a bunch of Debian mirrors for dselect/apt, and when my dad wants a piece of software to do whatever, I'll tell him to open a terminal window and type apt-get install [whatever]. If there's a security problem, I'll tell him to do apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade. In fact, I'll probably set up an icon on the desktop to do it.
If you really don't need support, why are you using Red Hat Linux at all? I'd think it'd be worth switching to debian-stable... All the stability of Red Hat Enterprise, plus you get to avoid RPM and sendmail.
Multimedia stuff needs to be ported to Linux. I have licensed versions of Photoshop and Dreamweaver on my iBook... (and its here gentle reader where I show my coding ignorance) surely to god its a few compile time flags away from being a Linux version.
Nope. Those are Carbon applications. Linux has nothing like the Carbon API.
Sony has a lot of the same problems, unfortunately.
SCEA (Sony Computer Entertainment America) often decides that the most innovative and cool games from SCEE are too good for America. e.g. Wipeout Fusion and Dropship were turned down by SCEA, Vib Ribbon for PlayStation was never released, and so on. If you've written yet another FPS, though, SCEA will release it.
Sometimes other companies (like BAM!) have stepped up and bought US distribution rights for Sony's European and Japanese titles. Sometimes not.
I really don't understand why SCEA turns down games that are on sale in Europe, delaying their distribution in the US by months or preventing it entirely. It's not even like they have to translate the game from Japanese.
Latest example: Silent Hill 3. On sale since May in Europe. Why the hell isn't it on sale in the USA? They expect us to wait until August while everyone on the net raves about it. Yeah, that makes sense.
Well, there we have another issue. Yes, it may be easier to fix badly-written code than write new code--but it's also a lot more dull and unpleasant. If you're confident of your ability to write the code, writing well-written new code is a much more attractive proposition. You also don't then have to deal with licensing issues and other questions that might dog a commercial organization.
So one message to open source developers might be that the original authors really need to spend a little extra time writing the code cleanly and commenting it, because otherwise other people are much less likely to want to contribute improvements.
Case in point: My urge to contribute to Mozilla vanished rapidly when I saw the state of the code.
I use libraries (or modules). However, I don't think I've ever used available source code as a starting point for anything.
Reason 1: Most free source code is crappy. When looking for C code, for instance, you'll hardly ever find any that bothers to check the return value of malloc() and other functions that might fail.
Reason 2: Even when the code isn't crappy, it's usually not adequately commented.
Reason 3: Even if you find that rare piece of code which is both well-written and adequately commented, chances are it's not documented.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, VAT is a little different from Sales Tax.
The way VAT on new manufactured goods is supposed to work is that the company that makes the product charges VAT on it, but they reclaim the VAT on the pieces used to make the product (or it's not charged in the first place).
So even in the worst case where (say) company A makes a motherboard, ships it to company B who add a case and sell it as a barebones kit to company C, who custom build a computer and sell it to the end user, the computer has only been taxed once.
So if you're some guy in the UK selling custom-built PCs on eBay, yes, the EU expects you to charge VAT on the sale, and then claim back any VAT you paid when you bought the parts.
That's a highly simplified explanation, in fact. I used to write accounting software for a living, and European VAT regulations are comparable to the US tax code in their complexity. Drafted by a committee of dunces with no regard for how difficult they will be for the poor sap who has to implement them, and concerned only with ensuring that the right government bodies get their piece of the cash, and the right business donors get the appropriate preferential treatment.
How it all applies to someone not in the EU at all, I don't know. It'll be fascinating to find out.
When I lived in the UK, for a while I used to keep a "top ten rip-offs" list of Mac software that was outrageously overpriced in the UK compared to the US. Often no localization had been done; it was exactly the same software. I'd get a UK and a US MacWarehouse catalog, plug the numbers into a little Hypercard database, and it would spit out a Usenet posting. The idea was to try and shame some of the developers into moving to less crooked distributors.
Aladdin software actually wrote to me about how it wasn't their doing, and that there were basically two or three big software distributors in the UK who all overcharged by outrageous amounts. (In other words, most likely a cartel.) Still, there was wide variation in markup, from a few percent to totally obscene.
As I recall, the reigning champion was Dave Winer's Userland, whose UK markup was over 200%. It was cheaper to fly to New York and buy a copy than to buy it in the UK.
Things aren't as outrageous in the UK these days. I priced up building a computer for my family last month, and it turned out that buying the parts in the UK was no more expensive than buying in the US and shipping them the finished computer. Which is still bad, but not I-can't-believe-it bad.
Microsoft used to publish scary statistics stating that there was massive piracy of their software in the UK compared to the US. Well, the reason for that is they simply counted how many people were running Word (via surveys), counted number of sales through official channels in each country, and hey presto...
What they missed is that nobody I knew--literally nobody--bought their software from UK sources. Everyone would mail order from the US. So the apparent piracy rate in the UK would rise, and the apparent piracy rate in the US would drop.
Makes me wonder about the basis for similar statistics we see bandied about these days.
No Gaim for Mac or Windows.
There's a difference between "native methods" which are part of the Java platform, and ones which are not. Are you suggesting that this application is 100% Pure Java?
I've tried three Windows clients, all were overly complicated or buggy (or both).
TVJab on the Mac is OK, but that's not much good for the Microsoft-impaired.
Never used MSN, never plan to.
Firstly, I use Windows 2000 at work, and it isn't anything like as stable as Linux.
Secondly, they don't want to pay for Windows 2000, and I'm sure as hell not buying them a copy.
There's a menu just like the Windows start menu, you open Netscape and it's just like Netscape on Windows, and so on. I somehow doubt that the navigation issues are going to be insurmountable. My mother never even mastered use of styles in Word, so it's not like they have extensive experience they'll be losing in the switch.
You also seem very unclear on what the word 'hypocritical' means.
People think I'm strange because I use proper punctuation on IRC.
You think that's stupid? An INS goon told me I had to write both names as my signature on a form I was filing. I pointed out that my signature was one word, and was on every other piece of paperwork already, as well as all my credit cards, ID cards, passport, and so on. I also pointed out that it would mean the signature on that piece of paperwork wouldn't match any of the others. Still he insisted. So I signed my name normally, then wrote the family name out afterwards in non-cursive script, since (as mentioned in another reply) I can't write cursive any more.
I wonder if this posting will be allowed as evidence of proper intent if the FBI come after me for "forging" a fake signature?
Children are taught to write making only downstrokes? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. The American educational system continues to amaze me.
One summer when I was around 14 I redesigned my own handwriting from scratch. Inspired by the bauhaus design school, I worked out an optimal set of upper and lower case letterforms. The idea was to make every symbol unambiguous, so I adopted European-style crossed 7s and Zs, '1' and 'l' were distinguishable, and so on. This later helped a huge amount in mathematics and physics.
Next I worked out the easiest way to write each symbol in a small number of strokes. So an "A" is two strokes, an "N" is one stroke, and so on.
Then over the summer vacation, I practiced. By the time school started again, I was pretty much up to the speed I used to be able to achieve via cursive lettering. I switched to my new handwriting at school, and refused to go back. The teachers didn't mind too much because it was easier for them to read and mark my work.
Twenty years later, I cannot remember how to write cursive script at all, except for my one-word signature. If I'm in a real hurry, I can partially join some adjacent letters to increase speed at the expense of legibility, but it's rare I have to write something that quickly.
Obviously designing your own bauhaus-inspired handwriting system is exceptionally geeky, downright obsessive even, but the point is there's nothing inherently slow or ugly about non-cursive handwriting.
Another unexpected benefit was that my handwriting turned out to be incredibly easy for the Newton printed recognizer to read. I got better accuracy on the Newton that I've ever managed to get from Graffiti on the Palm.
They used to. Orange Micro sold one, I think Apple even had their own at one point. They were never popular enough.
It may be mostly written in Java, but it's calling a buttload of native code to do the actual work. Don't believe me? Disable native methods in your VM and see how far it gets.
So let's try to keep the hype under perspective. What we really have here is a demonstration that Java is fast enough to handle the game logic, and maybe the 3D calculations, of a 3D game that isn't playable, all at a fraction of the speed of Objective-C. Oh, I'm so impressed.
The problem with Jabber used to be that it didn't work. This article has inspired me to give it another try, and I'm glad to say it does now work, so I'm going to try using it for a while.
There's still a big problem that'll get in the way of user acceptance, however: it's extremely complicated. Some of the complication is unavoidable, in that you have a multi-server system with gateways to multiple external protocols. However, some of the issues are just down to the fact that it's a system where the clients are currently being designed and built by hackers, for hackers.
What is a message queue? Why do I need to care about it? I've never seen any other IM client that expected me to deal with such a thing. "Close the event window going to compressed mode"? Uh, whatever.
"Custom presence entries"? WTF is that, presence of people who don't exist? "Synchronize presence with multiple copies"--uh, why would I want that, in case I have multiple personalities? I just want to log on from wherever I am and have it work.
I'm not trying to be picky here. I'm a computer scientist. If this thing isn't blatantly obvious to me without looking at the documentation, there is zero, I repeat, zero chance that my mother and my arts graduate friends will be able to deal with it.
My less-technically-inclined parents are begging me to put Linux on their computer.
Why?
Because their Windows system has hosed itself or been wiped out by viruses and trojan horses four times in the last year or two. Every time they get it all working again, suddenly they have an infestation of pop-up penis enlargement ads, or everyone they know starts getting e-mailed virus file attachments. Even when Windows is not obviously hosed, it tends to crash and otherwise behave erratically, because they're not technically astute, so they don't know how to tune Windows to be reliable.
They only use the computer for e-mail, web, word processing, spreadsheet, and other simple tasks that can easily be handled with open source software. They only occasionally need to exchange documents with other people, and OpenOffice's compatibility will be fine for that purpose.
What they want is a computer that's reliable--both in the sense of not crashing, and in the sense of continuing to work without being reinstalled every six months. Not having to pay Microsoft annual fees is merely a bonus.
So I'm gonna give 'em Xandros, just on the off chance that they really do still need one or two pieces of Windows software. If they don't, they've got a Debian system, so it's all good. I'll set up a bunch of Debian mirrors for dselect/apt, and when my dad wants a piece of software to do whatever, I'll tell him to open a terminal window and type apt-get install [whatever]. If there's a security problem, I'll tell him to do apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade. In fact, I'll probably set up an icon on the desktop to do it.
Another common variant is "everyone pirates software, movies and music, so it's morally OK for me to do it".
US Robotics have just launched the USR8200 storage router. XScale based, runs Linux. Plug in a Firewire drive and it's a file server.
If you really don't need support, why are you using Red Hat Linux at all? I'd think it'd be worth switching to debian-stable... All the stability of Red Hat Enterprise, plus you get to avoid RPM and sendmail.
See signature? I haven't heard his position on the RIAA, but he spoke out against media consolidation...
Unfortunately, going to concerts often involves supporting TicketBastard and ClearChannel, both of whom are close in evilness to the RIAA.
I remember not long ago when Slashdot had an anti-Mac bias. Maybe, just maybe, things have changed because Apple has done a lot of stuff right?
Tell 'em I'd buy one. And I will never buy one with Windows.
Well, if Sharp ships the Zaurus clamshell in the US I'll probably get that...
Nope. Those are Carbon applications. Linux has nothing like the Carbon API.
Sony has a lot of the same problems, unfortunately.
SCEA (Sony Computer Entertainment America) often decides that the most innovative and cool games from SCEE are too good for America. e.g. Wipeout Fusion and Dropship were turned down by SCEA, Vib Ribbon for PlayStation was never released, and so on. If you've written yet another FPS, though, SCEA will release it.
Sometimes other companies (like BAM!) have stepped up and bought US distribution rights for Sony's European and Japanese titles. Sometimes not.
I really don't understand why SCEA turns down games that are on sale in Europe, delaying their distribution in the US by months or preventing it entirely. It's not even like they have to translate the game from Japanese.
Latest example: Silent Hill 3. On sale since May in Europe. Why the hell isn't it on sale in the USA? They expect us to wait until August while everyone on the net raves about it. Yeah, that makes sense.
Well, there we have another issue. Yes, it may be easier to fix badly-written code than write new code--but it's also a lot more dull and unpleasant. If you're confident of your ability to write the code, writing well-written new code is a much more attractive proposition. You also don't then have to deal with licensing issues and other questions that might dog a commercial organization.
So one message to open source developers might be that the original authors really need to spend a little extra time writing the code cleanly and commenting it, because otherwise other people are much less likely to want to contribute improvements.
Case in point: My urge to contribute to Mozilla vanished rapidly when I saw the state of the code.
I use libraries (or modules). However, I don't think I've ever used available source code as a starting point for anything.
Reason 1: Most free source code is crappy. When looking for C code, for instance, you'll hardly ever find any that bothers to check the return value of malloc() and other functions that might fail.
Reason 2: Even when the code isn't crappy, it's usually not adequately commented.
Reason 3: Even if you find that rare piece of code which is both well-written and adequately commented, chances are it's not documented.