I'm Brazilian and I started working from home recently. Since my wife and I don't like they city we're currently living in, we decided to do some research and find a city where we would like to move to (still inside Brazil). If you can read portuguese, you might find our announcement and the criteria we've used useful: https://plus.google.com/112051803418632798341/posts/BTDpsC9Enta

I have plenty of friends who moved from Europe to Brazil. If you're single, you'll probably enjoy it for quite some time, and you'll probably have fun no matter which part of the country you move to. If you have wife and/or kids, you should be extra extra careful when selecting a city or region to move to. Brazil is huge and the difference in quality of living vary a lot between the different regions. And pay attention: the poorest areas usually have the best offers in the tech field (mostly due to tax incentivies for the tech companies).

Good luck.

I have a totally different experience (I was working in the mobile phone business, which is kind of similar to the game industry you mention). I worked for two major mobile phone companies "doing scrum" from 2006 to 2011. It took me years to finally see the beauty of scrum really working in my team, and then I realized one important thing:

You can't do agile unless you really want to do agile and make an honest effort to do it "by the book". You can't make compromises and expect it to be "magical". You start making compromises, it stops working, plain and simple. The reality of the industry today is that a lot of people claim to be doing agile, but then you look closely and this is what they tell you:

- I'm using my bug tracking tool, because boards and papers are superfluous
- I still have my project manager (PM) around, because that's the way the hierarchy works in the company
- I don't need a Product Owner, the PM can do its job
- I don't need a dedicated scrum master, we can rotate developers to "conduct meetings"
- Estimating in points doesn't make sense for us, so we use hours instead
- Tracking velocity is too abstract, it never works
- I don't have testing together with the development because my QA team is in China
- 3x4h meetings every sprint? WTF? You expect my whole team to spend 12h in meetings at every interaction?
- ...

You want to do agile? Fire the product managers, hire secretaries to be scrum masters (computer background is a plus, but they're below the developers in the hierarchy) and put a UI designer or customer to be the product owner. And don't expect it to work on a distributed team: UI Designers, Developers and QA should attend all of the core meetings and should all work together in the same room or building. And doing it right is *HARD*. It took my previous team 2-3 years to "get it", but the results were awesome. Now I work as an Engineering Manager for an opensource company, doing upstream development... I don't have any expectation of ever implementing agile/scrum in my team, because I know it won't work in this scenario.

It's a callendar application and "Sex" comes from "Sexta-feira", which translated to English would be "Friday". In other words, whenever you use "Fri" in your callendar, we use "Sex". :P That said, as a Brazilian, I never, ever, had noticed that or associated our Friday with sex. :-)

I bought Win7 Home Premium for my gaming station and the package includes both 32 and 64 editions. Initially I installed the 64bits and used it for a month (new hardware with 4GB or RAM) but then I switched to 32bits because of buggy drivers.

I couldn't make my Logitech wingman driving wheel to work, my multifunctional driver was outdated and hard to find (Epson CX7300), my Audigy 2 ZS audio board didn't work out of the box and my network card (Intel whatever, onboard) was performing erratically after some time (not sure why, the win7 diagnostic was "problem with the driver").

Not to mention lots of trouble with low level applications such as dvd drive emulators (magic disk made my machine unusable and IIRC I had a few problems with daemon tools as well).

All of the aforementioned now work fine under win7 32bits.

So I don't recommend people to use Win7 64bits if they have old hardware around (joysticks, printers, scanners) or if they plan to use 3rd party drivers.

--
http://www.ademar.org/ || http://blog.ademar.org/

I live in the northeast of Brazil (one of the poorest regions) and I have a 10Mbps connection at home, as most of my friends. I pay R$ 69,00/month for it (USD 39.65) and it's fairly reliable. There are plans up to 100Mbps.

That said, I must say this is the reality of the middle-class in Brazil, which is less than 10% of the population here.

References:
http://www.gvt.com.br/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_Internet_Phenomenon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Brazil