Jul 2008 15 th
So much for a global company. How Apple & Others treat Europeans
Reading Pat Phelan’s blog yesterday about Apple and how it restricts the rest of the world as to what it can purchase through iTunes got me thinking. I’ve long known that Apple deploy such practices as do many other organizations. I don’t think its right at all, yet have thought I would have been a crackpot for thinking same. If I buy an iPhone to have access to all the applications and Games, that means I want access to ALL the games and applications and not a limited subset. Alas they (Apple) cannot be fooled by the use of a mere proxy server, you need to supply a US address too, thus making it impossible for us Europeans to but such games as “Insert desired super cool game not currently available in Europe”.
Another thing Apple engage in which I am also not a fan of, is over charging or taxing their European customers. For example, I recently bought an iMAC 24″ With the 3.06 Proc. Its US cost is $2,199.00, yet its Euro Price is €1,919.00. If the exchange rate were taken into consideration it would be €1,377.43 Euro (15th July 08 - 08:00). This sort of thing is not confined just to Apple, recently I’ve experienced the same sort of practices with Adobe, so I am guessing there are others too.
You could argue that its not possible to keep track of exchange rates. I say balderdash. I know many smaller companies that deploy either daily adjustments or realtime adjustments in order to be as competitive as possible. Yes, Apple don’t need to be competitive to an extent, however they do need to start looking after their customers in Europe and not discriminate against them based simply on where you are coming from. Currently a European customer in not as equal as a US customer to Apple it would appear, from my recent use of iTunes anyhow.
I don’t subscribe to the content licence argument either. If it could be arranged with the music companies it can be arranged with the TV,Film and Software houses. Then Apple may be really disruptive, changing EU broadcasting too.
Calling for a boycott of such products from their vendors is at best a pipe dream. Yes I know they are discriminating against me, but I still want to use their products, or indeed in some circumstances I may need to use them. So how do we register our complaints, how are we heard? Is blogging about it going to be enough? I don’t know, is my answer, but hell I’ll give it a try and add to the growing choir.
So back to the thinking, here is one for someone with a bit of time on their hands. Setup up a buinssess selling proxy serivces Not only web based proxy services, but also real world proxy services, where people order stuff they can’t get in their location so the end up purchasing through you. Yes it would be a pain, to do, but then again I don’t care, I just want my cool iPhone game…. NOW!!!!!!
1 CommentMay 2008 16 th
Network Manager & Open VPN Servers On Port 443 Fix
Now, after yesterdays post, I decided to play a bit more and set up an Open VPN connection to a remote site. Luckily the site was running the excellent IPCOP with an Open VPN service, however it was configured to run on port 443.
Searching high and low in the Network Manager applet on Ubuntu Heron, I could not find an option to connect on a specific port number. Bruised, I dumped my Open VPN config into /etc/openvpn and brought up the link manually.
Add a commentMay 2008 15 th
Installing the Groupwise Client on Ubuntu Hardy Heron
So we use GroupWise obviously. However for the most part, I spend my time on Ubuntu these days as I like XFCE4 and Ubuntu as a whole. This is not to say I don’t use my Novell Suse Enterprise Desktop, I do, quite a lot, but its also nice to have a bit of a play with other distros from time to time.
2 CommentsApr 2008 18 th
Running Confluence on port 80 or 443 using mod_proxy_ajp
Okay, I use Confluence a lot, and think despite some of its failings in the UI department (Although they are being addressed as version 2.8 shows) its a excellent Enterprise Wiki.
Now, not wanting to arse around with Tomcat all the time, I use the standalone build generally as its quite sufficient for my purposes. The problems arise when we have remote workers, whom are behind restrictive firewall policies. So that means I have to provide the service on 443. Now you could spend a bit of time configuring Tomcat to run on said port, but thats not recommended, plus you may want to use other technologies such a PHP etc. So here is a quick how to on getting confluence up and running on port 443 on Suse Enterprise Server 10 (Al tough the same applies to most Linux distros with the exception of the convoluted config Novell apply to Apache). This post presumes you already have installed Confluence standalone and its running fine.
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