The Australian dollar is nearing parity with the US dollar.
You wouldn’t think it to look at Apple’s prices, which are even more out of whack than usual. Take a look at the middle-of-the-range Macbook Pro (15″ display, 512MB VRAM, 2.5GHz CPU):
US price: US$2499
AU price: AU$3399
That’s ~$900 more to buy locally, or a 36% markup. I’m not entirely sure that it’s worth $900 to buy from a local dealer.
Popularity: 17% [?]
When I log a case and explicitly write in the notes “I am not in the office today, please contact me by email” what exactly leaves you in any doubt that phoning me at the office is useless?.
As a general principle I want you to send me email rather than call me anyway. If you call me, you have to try to comprehend my accent, I have to try to comprehend yours, and chances are we both end up feeling frustrated. Sending me an email, as I asked you to, saves us both a lot of time and irritation.
Dude, I am the damned customer! We pay your company way too much money to be spending months chasing you around to let us generate a damned license key.
Sybase ASE: an expensive but primitive toy, legacy software at best. And lest you think it’s worth paying for it to get decent support, forget that too. If you really want to give someone money for your database, give it to Sun/MySQL or Oracle. Their software support probably isn’t much better, but at least the software has seen significant improvement in the past decade.
Popularity: 25% [?]