The Vista Ripoff

 Computing, General  No Responses »
Feb 162007
 

So I was reading a review of Vista on The Register and was hardly surprised to see that the consumers are being ripped off again. It seems that they think that Microsoft can’t do currency conversions without making mistakes … I guess this is not too surprising given this is the company that gave us a calculator that made basic arithmetic mistakes.

However I decided to do a little checking myself and decided to use Amazon as the benchmark on differing costs on “Vista Ultimate Full” :-

Amazon.co.uk

£327
Amazon.com

$379

Next I converted the Amazon.com cost into pounds using £1 = $1.95 which is close enough for the purposes of this little rant :-

Amazon.com in pounds

£194

But wait! I forgot to add UK’s VAT rate of 17.5% :-

Amazon.com in pounds + VAT

£228

Now it is pretty obvious to me that £228 is considerably less than £327. Enough that I should do the calculation the other way around :-

Amazon.co.uk – VAT

£278

And to convert it into dollars :-

Amazon.co.uk – VAT in dollars

$543

So instead of $379, we in the UK pay $542 for our copies of Vista. That’s an increase of 43%! Now I could forgive a little bit of flab in the cost, but 43% is a little much to swallow. Apparently when The Register contacted Microsoft about this puzzling price discrepancy, Microsoft claimed they adjusted their prices to suit the market … or to put it another way, they gouge as much out of the consumer as they think they can get away with. Obviously they think that the average UK consumer is a bit of a numbskull.

It would be nice to prove them wrong. And ask the EU to take a little look into this matter.

Of course Microsoft is not the only company that tries to rip us off with the excuse of ‘tax variations’ and other bullshit reasons. Apple sells the Mac OSX operating system at widely varying prices :-

Apple.com US Price for OSX

$129
Apple.com UK price for OSX

£89

Hmm. Doesn’t seem like a ripoff compared with Vista does it ? Take a closer look :-

Apple.com UK price without VAT

£76
Apple.com UK price without VAT in dollars

$147

Hey that’s only 14% more expensive in the UK than the US. All worship Apple! No wait … that’s still a huge ripoff, but just not quite as excessive as Microsoft.

Of course this gives the Linux, Solairs and *BSD marketing types a good slogan :-

£0 or $0 – No ripoff there!

It is interesting to see that Microsoft could not give The Register reviewer a free review copy … you might understand it if it were a small company with a valuable product, but Microsoft and Vista hardly fit in there. Microsoft are probably wondering why they didn’t get a positive review 🙂

Idiotic Packaging

 General  No Responses »
Feb 032007
 

I had reason to buy a couple of USB leads the other day, but this entry has not got anything to do with the leads themselves, but with the packaging which can be found keeping people away from many other goods. It is that clear heat-sealed hard plastic which makes things like leads, and other small items so easy to hang up on a rack in a shop. They’re not exactly easy to get into are they ?

In fact they are probably the worst kind of packaging out there … a waste of oil, and very difficult to get into. There are probably quite a few packages waiting unopened around the country when you consider that not everybody has a great deal of strength in their hands. I spent a lot of time using my fingers (hitting the keyboard), but I certainly don’t find it easy.

I guess this kind of packaging does have one advantage … it is easier for the items to be displayed in a shop as they hang very conveniently on those hooks shops use. This gives the lie to the idea that manufacturers only care about the consumer. They obviously care more about the convenience of the shop keeper.

Well, it is time to get the message across. Every time you (and I) buy something contained inside inconvenient packaging, ask for the package to be opened as you buy it … make it clear that you find such packaging very difficult to get into, and that you won’t buy the product if it isn’t opened for you.

Car Alarms

 General  No Responses »
Feb 032007
 

I find car alarms really irritating, at least the ones that make loud noises to alert everyone that someone wandered by the car a little too closely. Mind you I can live with those, but the ones that really get my goat are those that are so sensitive that they go off almost continuously.

There is one car with a particularly sensitive alarm near my flat that is always going off. One night it was going off every 10 minutes, all night!. The owner obviously needs a lesson in social responsibility.

Photography: Sensor Cleaning & Wandering Around Old Portsmouth

 Photography  1 Response »
Jan 272007
 

I hate cleaning the sensor on a DSLR … there you are doing the equivalent of scraping a spatula across the surface of something tiny yet sufficiently expensive that it would cause me a heart seizure if I were to scratch it. Not uncommonly I clean my sensor only to find out that the dust spots found in the raw images are still there! However this time I seem to have removed a good amount of grime.

Took the newly cleaned camera out with my fisheye lens around Old Portsmouth to make some images. Not a bad little stroll :-

Elderly

Educating People About Taxes

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Jan 182007
 

Everyone hates paying taxes. To be honest nothing is going to change that at all, but there are a few things that could be done to improve the situation. At present people want to pay as little tax as possible, whilst having well funded public services. Which is kind of foolish and impossible to achieve; of course there are ways in which to make public services more efficient but that is a whole other rant.

I should point out at this point, that I’m somewhat partial here as my own salary comes indirectly from taxation (and pretty stingy the tax-payers are too), but that is also a whole other rant.

The funny thing is that when you start working, you get a nasty shock when you get your first payslip about how much disappears in the direction of the government and nobody is there to explain what you get for your money. Why not include classes in school about what taxation gets us ?

All that taxation does provide us with useful services which include :-

  • A public health service that anyone can use at no cost or vastly reduced cost.
  • A police service intended to protect us from criminals.
  • Armed forced to defend us from external threats.
  • A social security system to provide us with a safety net in case we cannot earn an income.
  • An education system that educates everyone.

And I dare say I’ve left loads out … I nearly forgot education where I work! But we don’t get told about what we get for our money, we are expected to “just know”. Of course it some ways it is obvious, but why not make it clearer ?

In fact why not make the yearly pay slip (the P60) larger and include rough figures for how much we paid for each service ? If you get something that says you paid £10,000 in tax, of which £1,500 went to pay for Health, etc., we are more likely to be less critical of taxation.

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