So we Brits aren’t happy about the inflated price of Micro$oft products.

http://www.computershopper.co.uk/?news/news_story.php?id=106025

Apparently Windows Vista Home Premium Edition (Upgrade) costs $153.99 in the States (approx £78.50 ) and £144.99 in the UK. It just needs a stronger pound to be spot on double!

Certainly it seems a rip off but I do have to admit to some (slight) sympathy. Internationalisation is no simple business. I’ve just spent the morning wrestling with upper casing “º” to “ª” and not “_” as it tends to come out if you don’t do it properly. Which rather upsets any Turkish folk typing into upper case only fields.

Gone are the simple days of  c -= ‘a’-'A’;

You need to have a locale specific function that checks what your regional settings are and maps characters appropriately.

So I can see that it does require extra work to put out a UK version and the US is always going to be a bigger customer base (and software costs are basically  development time / units shipped). However, twice the price seems to be a case of what the market will wear not what the product is worth - but then isn’t that how most pricing is arrived at?

If you’ll pay that much they’ll charge that much, the only solution is don’t buy it.

Never mind hacking, viruses, wireless networks and the like a few lads with big boots and little judgement kicked in the office door and made off with a motley collection of old laptops and hand helds. A P1 a PII and a Celeron - none had working batteries and they left the mains units.

Not a great haul for them but a wasted morning for us whilst the police dusted etc and one of the laptops had copy protected software worth a few thousand - if you happen to be into comms s/w development (which I kinda of doubt our “perps” are). Various other units have been damaged as they ripped stuff out in a rush - I assume they were working against to a time once the alarms were ringing.

It’s the waste that depresses me. When my car was done over I lost about £50 of kit (2nd hand value) and paid £140 to have the glass replaced. Apart from the damage and the increased insurance the loss of a mornings work was worth many, many times the value of the kit. The Ankh-Morpork approach of a thieves guild who leave a receipt and won’t rob you more than once a year seems more and more attractive.

Fortunately we do archive off site on a regular basis so we knew we hadn’t lost source code before we knew the PC’s & servers were OK.

So how secure are you? When did you last take an offsite backup?