It varies on which version you get - some of them you can (or could - been a couple of years since I used it). That is a warning sign though - some of the dev ones (with visual studio/etc) are testing only, same as MSDN.

Yep - the magic words to google are "Microsoft Action Pack Subscription" - for startups it's great. Tons of useful software for cheap. You may also qualify for BizSpark which is even better (and cheaper - although $500 isnt too bad.)

In Australia; business taxes can be reclaimed against shareholders tax through a system called Franking Credits; there's a similar (but different) system setup for foreign investors - although a company can only pick one scheme or the other. Regardless, it's a bit of a moot point.

As a manager over a team in Shanghai; I can confirm that salaries are rapidly equalising there as well; you also need to pay very high payroll taxes (up to 40%); so the cost advantage is beginning to go away. (Where 5 years ago you could hire a team for the price of a single american developer; now you only get ~2 people)

On the upside; the food is better in China.

I'm pretty sure there's several amendments to it which have brought it periodically further up to date. I thought the last was 3.5?

And it's generally not a good idea to rely on C# >= 3.5 in Mono anyway; it tends to be missing fundamental features or functions.

Kinda. C# and .NET and the standard library are a ECMA and IEEE standard. (Microsoft pushed them in as standards), I'm not entirely sure if they did that royalty free (I have a feeling they did), but even if they didn't, ECMA/IEEE requires RAND licensing at worst.

A lot of the top selling iOS/Android games are done with Unity; which also uses C#/Mono. Actually the PS Suite SDK looks very similar to Unity in a lot of respects.

(Actually to take it a full loop; Unity pushes to the PS anyway, Rochard and a few others have gone cross-console with Unity)

Amazon AWS bills you bandwidth directly. A DDoS could get very expensive.

That's because the whole thing is rather short and vague - and in general pretty poorly written; and a lot has had to be interpreted around it. (e.g. freedom of speech is inferred from the "vibe" of the document rather than the document itself.)

OH THE HUGE MANATEE!

Same here, Shanghai.

Actually it does. Here's how:

- Conversion from cash to bank account balances often carries a small 'change processing fee' with commercial banks. It's not big; but if you are depositing lots of tiny small change, many banks will charge you for the service. (esp. the other way around - getting cash out as coins, for giving change, etc.)
- Loss/theft - it's a lot easier for cash to go missing than it is for electronic payments. (plus costs for security for cash stored on premises)
- Going to the bank and depositing it regularly is going to cost anyway (salary for time spent, fuel, etc.)

I'd say the above equally match or exceed the 1-2.5% most merchant banks will charge for CC processing services. NFC pricing is generally the same amount. The fees charged by merchant banks for CC facilities are actually completely reasonable - there's some other aspects which hurt a bit more (90 clearance windows, chargebacks/fraud, etc); but the fees are perfectly fine.

Courtesy of the modern banking industry however - sunks costs are often amortized into the production cost. So sunk costs become part of your production costs.

OVH also has a support option which is "Hey, you made a urgent ticket. Isn't that nice? We might look at it in two weeks."

OVH's support is literally 9-5 French time, Monday to Friday. There is ZERO out of hours support; and they have such a backlog that tickets dont even get looked into for a few business days.

*whoosh*