Re: OT (was Re: ram/raid1)
On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 11:45:17AM +0200, Giacomo Mulas wrote:
> On Fri, 7 Apr 2006, Erik Mouw wrote:
>
> >You can order memory everywhere in the EU, that's what the "no
> >obstacles for trading goods" rules are for. If you can find memory
> >cheaper in (for example) Germany, buy it over there and have it shipped
> >to Italy. Be sure to let your Italian vendor know that he missed a
> >sale.
>
> Yes, you can do that if you are buying it for yourself as a private citizen
> or company. If you are buying it for a public institution, than you will
> require italian invoices and the like, which by and large means you have to
> buy in Italy. I know, unfortunately. I had to buy a (way) suboptimal laptop
> for my work, despite what I wanted (amd 64 based, large screen resolution,
> more than 2GB ram...) being easily available elsewhere, just for this
> reason. I had either to fork money out of my own pocket or buy something
> worse and more expensive. After many years of complaining (and having chosen
> many times before to spend my own money) I finally gave up and settled for
> the worse, more expensive solution with the office money (what the heck!).
That sounds like an abuse of EU rules. A German/Dutch/French/Spanish/etc
company should have no problem selling stuff to Italian public
institutions. If Italian public institutions require invoices from
Italian companies, that is an unnecessary burden for equal access to
markets.
There is however a workaround, we sometimes used it at our university
in order to work around silly internal accounting rules (invoices over
5k EUR had to be OK'ed by the dean, even if the money came from an EU
RACE project): one of my colleagues with an own company bought the
complete stuff, and resold it (in quantities less than 5 kEUR) to the
university.
> And, of course, companies _know_ this situation and exploit it, making very
> different commercial offers for different national markets (see e.g.
> differences in HP offers on the web, just for an example, between US and
> EU).
Complain to the EU, this is not supposed to happen.
Erik
--
+-- Erik Mouw -- www.harddisk-recovery.com -- +31 70 370 12 90 --
| Lab address: Delftechpark 26, 2628 XH, Delft, The Netherlands
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