I’m vaguely hunting for a laptop. Well, okay, a little more than vaguely – but as they’re reputedly one of the more-commonly-fraudulent items listed on eBay, use of that service as a purchasing vehicle is less than certain.
Software piracy also features… but, of course, there seems to be little that can be done to actually report this (if eBay have a “Report violation” link, it’s adequately hidden from me). Observe this question from earlier today on an iBook with OS 10.4.4 and Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign, and MS Office for Mac included:
Me: Does this come with original CDs + licenses for OS 10.4, MS Office for Mac and Adobe software?
Seller: No.
(Yeah, that was fulltext of the question + answer!)
And on another listing (I didn’t ask the question on this one!) advertised as including iLife 06, MS Office 2004 and Adobe CS2:
Q: Are you selling the software disks too?
A: No. I’ve installed the software, and all the apps work, but I’m only going to be sending the laptop and its power cable. Thanks.
Sigh.
(p.s. though it may appear this way from this post, I’m not convinced I want a Mac laptop anymore. In fact, I’d probably prefer a PC because they’re lighter + cheaper than their Apple counterparts)
Don’t do it! Laptops are EVIL!
I tend to agree RE the Mac laptop. My primary decision draws from looking at the applications I use — I’m aware that Mac OSX is happy to talk with Microsoft networks, and run MS applications, but I see this option as something of a patch for simply using the “real thing” on a PC.
I’ve been using Office on a Mac PowerBook for the last few weeks and I’m not totally impressed — the software does the same thing, but it takes longer to do what you need to do (for me, anyway).
I’m actually indifferent about the software! We use MS domains here, of course, but I don’t really care for a laptop that only I would be using. As for MS Office/Mac, I’d be equally comfortable with iWork (and perhaps end up using neither except to open documents I am sent). Photoshop would be a nice bonus if I didn’t have to pay for it ;-) But there’s no point if it’s pirated… I could always pirate it myself if I were that way inclined, and as it stands it’s only artificially inflating the value of an auction on eBay!
No, the deciding factor for me is the hardware. Smaller (12″) PC laptops are lighter + faster/$ than the iBook is, plus I can comfortably run whatever I want on it (they’ll ship with Windows, of course, but I could also install Ubuntu without much/any pain — if I stick with Windows, I could even play games!)
Ebay protects sellers that sell pirated Spanish DVDs
About 2 months ago, I was looking for an old spanish cartoon show on eBay, Candy Candy, I later found out that a seller named ” shambalakumara ” has all of these episodes on DVD. I was very excited at first and so I bid on the DVD’s. Finally, at the end, I won the auction for $280.00 US dollars, including the shipping from Venezuela. It took me 4 days to get my DVD’s, but I was very dissapointed when I received them as all of these DVD’s were cheap DVD-R’s , low quality graphics, and bad copies as some of them didn’t even work. I emailed this seller, named Eva Finol, and told her that I want original DVD’s, not copies, but she didn’t want give me a refund. I contacted ebay and explained the problem, they told me that they will help me. But later they told me that I could not get a refund because I don’t use the payment company PAYPAL, but they will suspend the seller for selling pirated videos, so they suspended this seller… — for like 2 weeks, as the same seller came back to sell more pirated DVD’s en ebay. I complained again and an ebay representer named “Maria” told me that this seller is a “Respected power seller,” which means this seller makes a lot of money for ebay so they are not going to stop this. This seller continues selling thousand of dollars on pirated DVD ‘s, and eBay is happy with her because they make a lot of money with the sales. You can see the list of pirated material that this seller has on ebay on this page . If you can, please tell to ebay to stop protecting piracy removing sellers like “shambalakumara” from eBay. Thank you.