I have bought Australian made sailing equipment from America at less than half the price it is sold locally. In fact with one order the American supplier had to order it from Australia first, then ship it to me. So it got shipped from Australia to the US and then back again and was less than 1/2 of the price it was here. Here's an example:
US: http://www.ronstan.us/marine5/product.asp?prodno=RF76
AU: http://www.ronstan.com.au/marine5/product.asp?prodno=RF76
So even local companies are ripping off the Australian consumer.
I've been running Mandriva/Mandrake off and on since 7.0 It's now my OS of choice since the 2005 LE release. The reason I like Mandriva so much is that it is based on Red Hat which a lot of workplaces use as their server OS. This means the enviroment I use at home is similar to what I use at work, I need my/etc/sysconfig/. Ubuntu feels foreign to me as I just don't like the way things are set up and it' s only on one CD so you need a net connection when you want more software, the foreign feeling also goes for SuSe (YAST is terrible). So why don't I run Fedora? Well I find that in terms of configuration tools and package management (urpmi) Mandriva is better suited for the home Desktop than Fedora is. I run Fedora 3 on my testbed system, a minimal install without an X server.
The company I work for (in Australia) would take Linux a lot further if the majority of software producers would support Linux. We run Linux on most of our routers and servers however, we would probably take it as far as the desktop in the office network if the 3rd party software we use would run on Linux. I'm not talking about e-mail, or word processing software I'm talking about online banking interfaces etc. Every few months or so we install another piece of software somewhere that only runs on Windows. At least our own software engineers build the majority of our proprietry software to run on Linux.
I like surfing the web with Lynx under Cygwin with the colors set to grays. To the average person who walks past it looks like I'm working. They think I'm doing some work using the command line.
As the IT area in my office is too full I'm sitting in accounts where they have no clue what you are doing, but had I opened a web page in a regular browser it would look bad.
Slashdot Mirror
I have bought Australian made sailing equipment from America at less than half the price it is sold locally. In fact with one order the American supplier had to order it from Australia first, then ship it to me. So it got shipped from Australia to the US and then back again and was less than 1/2 of the price it was here. Here's an example: US: http://www.ronstan.us/marine5/product.asp?prodno=RF76 AU: http://www.ronstan.com.au/marine5/product.asp?prodno=RF76 So even local companies are ripping off the Australian consumer.
I've been running Mandriva/Mandrake off and on since 7.0 It's now my OS of choice since the 2005 LE release. The reason I like Mandriva so much is that it is based on Red Hat which a lot of workplaces use as their server OS. This means the enviroment I use at home is similar to what I use at work, I need my /etc/sysconfig/. Ubuntu feels foreign to me as I just don't like the way things are set up and it' s only on one CD so you need a net connection when you want more software, the foreign feeling also goes for SuSe (YAST is terrible). So why don't I run Fedora? Well I find that in terms of configuration tools and package management (urpmi) Mandriva is better suited for the home Desktop than Fedora is. I run Fedora 3 on my testbed system, a minimal install without an X server.
The company I work for (in Australia) would take Linux a lot further if the majority of software producers would support Linux. We run Linux on most of our routers and servers however, we would probably take it as far as the desktop in the office network if the 3rd party software we use would run on Linux. I'm not talking about e-mail, or word processing software I'm talking about online banking interfaces etc. Every few months or so we install another piece of software somewhere that only runs on Windows. At least our own software engineers build the majority of our proprietry software to run on Linux.
I hope they include support for the MS Intellimouse. The extra buttons work in Firefox so why can't they work with Konqueror?
I like surfing the web with Lynx under Cygwin with the colors set to grays. To the average person who walks past it looks like I'm working. They think I'm doing some work using the command line. As the IT area in my office is too full I'm sitting in accounts where they have no clue what you are doing, but had I opened a web page in a regular browser it would look bad.