Never got this do-everything-on-line malarkey ;)
+1 Libre office
Posts by nickpaton
7 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Mar 2011
What's not up, Docs? Google Docs goes titsup in time for Friday beers
China and US argue over smog tweets
Wednesday 6th June 2012 10:19 GMT
Pollution is Caused by the West's addiction to (Fake) Chinese Goods
Rather than looking at how or who is monitoring the pollution levels, surely we need to ask why the pollution is being caused in the first place.
Most well known household brands filling the shop shelves are manufactured in China; simple argument - Chinese manufacture is cheaper than UK / Europe.
Fake grey imports from China continue to flood every western market area; not only do they deprive the original manufacturers of the income that is rightly theirs (even if they had them made in China in the first place - ooh the irony!), but they are mostly poorly manufactured, non compliant and just plain dangerous, and yet we continue to choose to buy them at the knock down prices we all demand.
Of even greater concern are items we think are genuine but turn out to be anything but. My own area is IT electronics and we recently suffered from being sold fake Graphics Chips, despite us carrying out extensive research (in as far as one can!) on the Chinese sellers. The fact that they were fake only came to light after post-fitting testing, and even then it was impossible to visually identify them as fake.
The electronic component market is so extensive flooded with fakes that I'm now almost afraid of buying from even well known electronics distributors, since it's not unknown for their shelves to be unwittingly filled with fake components.
In summary, if the west chose not to buy goods manufactured in China, and manufacturers chose not to have their goods made in China, then this must surely result in reduced pollution? The problem is that we demand ever lower prices to feed our "Goods Addiction" for the latest and best, so in my book that makes us partially complicit in China's pollution.
I realise I'm whistling in the wind, and we can only hope that Chinese manufacturing overheads continue to rise and will lead to manufacturing returning to the West.
iPad chargers can open beer bottles
PlayStation Network credit cards protected by encryption
Friday 29th April 2011 13:02 GMT
Same Old, Same Old
Sony have been caught out at long last!
Working in the IT repair industry we get Sony laptops in all the time with unsoldered Nvidia Graphics Chips, as well as the unsoldered chips in PS3's.
Unlike most other manufacturers Sony has NEVER acknowledged these problems exist nor offered any sort of extended warranty repair scheme.
Regarding their laptops this compares with "responsible" companies like HP, Dell, Lenovo etc etc who offered / are still offering such warranties for laptops with graphics failures due to the manufacturing issues with Nvidia GPU's, and which Nvidia are picking up the tab for by the way.
Sony appears to have chosen to ignore the problem and if the laptop is outside their normal warranty period then they will not repair any laptop with this issue.
Likewise with PS3's, bucketloads are failing with unsoldered chips and surely Sony must realise there is a major issue here. Maybe they're worried about action leading to aa class action (as happened with Nvidia) if the true extent of the issue is known. Or maybe they want people to spend more money on a new console - but I'm sure that's not the case!!!
I guess one could conclude that Sony seems not to care one iota about their customers and to think it's OK to dump them when there are such problems (but again I'm sure that's not really true...).
Now they've nowhere to hide.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
