It's really irritating - whenever I'm in China, I feel like I'm in a desert of the free information (see: GFW & Github) and when I'm in the US I'm in a desert of accessible components for EE work. Now that I'm out of college, and have a better idea of what a EE builders paradise looks like, I should see if Taiwan bridges the gap here.
Not that bad. You can accesss any site like in the other countries. The only tool you need is a VPN account. GFW doesn't really block everybody. They can easily block the few big VPN providers but they've never done that. (I'm using StrongVPN). I don't think that's because they are ingnorant.
Oh I know, my family lives in China and I used to administer OpenVPN servers for them. Things have gotten a lot worse in the past couple of months as they start to deploy DPI and shut down suspicious connections. I believe my family uses Astrill for the moment which goes in and out.
I'm in Taiwan, and they really really really trying to bridge the gap here. Because it's a small country (23million people), the entrepreneurial opportunities are different, and most people are looking towards China instead as a big market for all kinds of things they make.
Having said that, I love being here (physicist at a local research institute), where there are places like Guanghua computer market, basically most electronics imaginable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guang_Hua_Digital_Plaza
Many of the things are still harder to get (e.g. I'd love to have in country source for the Atmel chips that are used in Arduinos), but loads of things are so cheap and ready to grab.
Just trying to get Taipei Hackerspace off the ground, to bridge the gap between the local opportunities and the vision that is quite often got imported by foreigners here. It's an explosive combination, I really want to help this forward, and see it to succeed. :)
Taiwan is great. I loved walking around Neihu in Taipei and seeing all the brand names in components right there, plus others you don't know because they make the stuff other companies brand.
Do you mean you can buy components in Neihu or just see the companies HQs? When I lived in Taipie, it was before the metro reached Neihu so I never fully explored it.
