But 10 years ago, there was no light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, and in a move reminiscent of "Atlas Shrugged", many Canadians simply gave up on their country and came to the States to seek their fortunes in the dot-com boom.
San Francisco and Silicon Valley has an enormous critical mass of Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans people, and Nerds. The counter-culture continues to thrive here.
Ditto for Montréal. After all, that's where MafiaBoy lives...
Quebec periodically holds votes on splitting from Canada. The last few times it has been real close. If this measure would pass it could lead to all kinds of economic problems (currency, import/export regulations) and Canada would be divided into 3 parts with 2 governments (east, west and Quebec). (big negative!).
The USA is separated in two (the other part being Alaska) by Canada running in the middle, so what is the problem????
Some people have commented on the freindliness of the French speakers. I think in Montreal, the people are more bilingual and friendly to English speaking tourists (especially if you are respectful). Outside of Montreal, I think they aren't so fond of tourists (but I could be wrong. I feel that a long term resident in any country or city ought to make an attempt to speak the local language. There may be some justification for some irritation over long term residents who refuse to try to speak French.
(neutral, maybe slightly negative).
Perhaps it is the yankee's assumption that everyone in the world speaks english and refusal to recognize that the opposite is true?
Montreal is one of the most international cities I have ever been to (very diverse range of ethnic groups live there).
(could be a big plus! I wonder about racial tensions though).
It seems safe, but I went as a tourist. Residents may feel differently.
As a 40 year resident, I haven't seen racial tensions. Racism just isn't in the french culture like it is in the anglo-saxon.
And having been in the receiving end of racism for so long (the french in Canada are treated just like the blacks are in the US) does wonder in making sure you're not racist.
When the klu-klux-klan tried to setup shop in Montréal some 12 years ago, the neighbours routed them out with baseball bats and generous kicks in the ass. They vanished under the rock they crawled from, never to be seen again...
What few racial tensions there are more likely to come from immigrants who have been told by the federal government that Québec is english and are suddenly surprised, when they arrive, to find out that it is french.
And other racial tensions come from the ineptness of the federal government immigration policies who will do blatantly stupid things like house a boatload of turkish refugees in a predominantly greek neighbourhood; in that case, the ethnic tensions are strictly constrained within the ethnic communities...
Otherwise, for the french it is considered good to date someone who is of a different race, but, again, the whites find themselves discriminated against by the immigrants... (It's **HARD** to date orientals!!!!)
I don't know about the elementary/secondary education system and other important aspects of Montreal. Perhaps someone who has grown up there or lived there could comm
School is absolutely *free* until college, and then college is dirt-cheap (on the order of $800-$1200 per semester) for top-notch universities (does the name "Mc-Gill" rings a bell?).
You can become a medical doctor for less than $50,000 (and I'm not talking US dollars)...
And its exactly this attitude and action which will create a huge market opportunity for some non us person or entity to manufacture and distribute parts and finished products that are free of these absurd encumberments
Et, the whole purpose of the SSCA is to make such "products free of absurd encumberments" ILLEGAL.
I very much doubt big hardware vendors would be in favor of the kind of copy protection SSSCA seems to demand - it would be very onerous to have government imposed standards here, it could create a huge black/grey market in imported "free" hardware.
Never mind the hardware vendors, think about the USERS. I don't think croporate amerika will kindly pay $500 more per workstation just to make sure that the PC in accounting won't be able to copy Goldmember.
Except, per the DMCA, it would be illegal for the software developers to write anything that duplicated the DRM machines. Hence the practical result would be that you could buy other machines, but they wouldn't work with the content on the DRM machines.
Note there will always be an underground, always some illegal sub-rosa work-around for a very few people who are dedicated hobbyists.
And there will be countries where FAIR USE rights is not a legal fiction.
Like Germany, where macrovision is illegal.
Can't those guys name things properly?
on
ULTra Robo-Taxi
·
· Score: 2
The thing ain't a taxi, it's a "on-demand Personal Rapid Transit", or rather, an "horizontal elevator", or for you trekkies, a "turbolift" (there was one also in "Space 1999").
Actually IBM's regular mainframes can. When you buy one of the higher end zSeries servers you get a box fully populated with ram and cpu's. If your liscense is for something less than the max # of cpu's and you later need to add capacity all you do is call IBM and they happily take your money and dial into your mainframe, they set a couple registers in the controller board and viola near instant hardware upgrade.
That's so typical IBM. A holdover from the days where they had two line printers, one who could print twice as fast as the other, rented at (of course) twice the cost. When you needed to upgrade, a trained monkey was sent and all he did was flip around two pulleys between the paper-feed and the motor...
There is a lot of activity around Linux in the marketplace today. Strategies
differ from vendor to vendor, and there are a variety of ways companies are
experimenting with, evaluating, and deploying Linux in their IT infrastructures.
Just like any technology decision, if and where to deploy Linux is a substantial
decision which involves matching the right technology to the right business
problem.
READ: Of course, with an infinite amount of money, every business problem
is solvable at the highest profit for the problem-solver...
Just as it is important to understand when technology can provide you
with an advantage, it is equally valuable to know when a technology is not
suited to a particular task regardless of how 'hot' that technology might
be. Sun does see a place for Linux in the IT infrastructure, as evidenced
by our recent announcement to ship Linux-based servers. Sun introduced low-priced,
horizontal Linux servers as an alternative to proprietary systems. Suited
for Web delivery at the edge of the network, Linux servers offer an alternative
to proprietary and closed environments such as Microsoft Windows.
READ: But Sun is of the opinion that it's proprietary servers, running
with proprietary hardware (such as the special disk drives with the "magic"
secret partition table, and the memory chips with the notch moved 1/10 inch)
and, of course, running proprietary Solaris Operating System is the best solution
overall, especially if you have an infinite amount of money to throw at YOUR
problem...
Recently, IBM announced a new 'Linux-only' mainframe, the z800, which
IBM is promoting as a way to consolidate multiple Linux and Unix[r] servers(1).
Running Linux on a mainframe doesn't change the fact that you must still maintain
an expensive, proprietary system, defeating the whole purpose of introducing
open standards like Linux. Although it's technically possible to configure
such a system, the question remains, "How well-suited is the system to the
task?"
READ: Definitely, here, we have a blatant attempt at fitting an hexagonal
peg into a pentagonal hole. Linux was conceived to run on discarded low-end
hardware in order to satisfy teenage-geek impulses, which is quite a different
thing than to run on the Big Iron dinosaurs IBM is well-known for.
Linux on the mainframe just doesn't compute. Here's why:
READ: You just can't run JCL and CICS and MVS and
CMS and Assembler on Linux. Cobol (even GNU-Cobol) will
make the kernel break into hysterics.
Linux on the mainframe is actually hosted by another proprietary operating
system, z/VM. The optimized operating system for IBM mainframes is z/OS, formerly
called MVS(2). Compared to z/OS, z/VM is a niche operating system with virtual
machine (VM) support for new hardware features added late or often not at
all(3). And Linux isn't designed to run in a virtual machine; implementation
decisions that make sense on PC hardware don't fit well in a virtual machine(4).
This is Linux. It's designed for Intel. It's not tuned for the mainframe hardware
in which it's running.
READ: On the other hand, Solaris is designed to run (well) solely on
Sparc architecture that made Sun famous.
Linux on the mainframe is complicated; this isn't Linux running on a
two-way Intel server. Despite IBM's claims of easy management(5), customers
still need a special machine room and specially trained staff for both z/VM
and Linux. Finding mainframe staffing is an obstacle in many organizations(6);
combining mainframe and Linux staffing further complicates the matter. Running
multiple Linux images still requires administration that needs to grow with
the number of images being run.
READ: Of course, you don't have any of those virtual machine nonsense
with Sun products: you simply plug in as many boxes as you need of machines.
No more software headaches for your operators!!!
Linux on the mainframe can't respond to the workload demands of Web serving
with high utilization--something IBM touted at the time of its z800 announcement.
Horizontally scaled Linux farms are designed to handle unpredictable demand
with above average peak loads. As demand rises, a load balancer distributes
the traffic evenly across servers, which increases utilization. Because design
capacity needs to handle peak demand, server farms often have a low utilization.
READ: Why do in software what can be done far more profitably (and piracy-immune!)
in juicy, expensi^h^h^h^h^h^h^h profitable hardware?
Given the relatively low cost of hardware, some organizations find this
trade-off acceptable to ensure appropriate service levels. Contrary to what
many believe, consolidating a Linux farm into multiple images on a mainframe
would not change the demand pattern. Although z/VM can start and stop Linux
images, it cannot dynamically add resources to match demand. As a result,
a mainframe would need to size for peak demand just as the Linux farm would;
high utilization is a myth.
READ: Of course, you can dynamically add and remove ressources from
a Sun cluster with the use of specially trained monkeys and servoids, which
is a better proposition than software hocus-pocusery within the deep, dark bowels
of an IBM mainframe.
It's neither fish nor fowl. Linux on the "mainframe" is not an open system,
and there is little incremental RAS benefit. Although IBM claims "zSeries
servers inherit the legendary IBM S/390 strengths in the areas of fault avoidance
and tolerance, recovery from failures, and concurrent maintenance and repair
for "always-on" availability"(7). We don't believe this to be true for zSeries
servers running Linux. The "legendary" IBM S/390 strengths IBM references
are the result of decades of development work on IBM's flagship mainframe
operating system, known today as z/OS. The fault recovery features of z/OS
are not found in Linux. z/VM does have some fault recovery features, but it
is not nearly as resilient as z/OS. For example, z/VM cannot take advantage
of Parallel Sysplex clustering, and VM hypervisor is an added single point
of failure(8).
READ: Of course, Sun cannot take advantage of Parallel Sysplex clustering
either, but that's more alphabet soup to muddy the waters and instill doubts
into potential buyers.
Applications that run on Linux for Intel need to be recompiled and recertified
for each new platform; thus the application portfolio to run Linux on a mainframe
is small(9). Consolidation without application availability just can't happen--and
if the applications don't run on your platform, or if there are costly ports
and changes to be made, cost savings can't be realized. Often the difference
in Intel versus mainframe applications makes porting difficult(10). Additionally,
different applications are ported to different distributions of Linux (for
example, Red Hat, SuSE, and Turbolinux). Getting applications to run on the
mainframe might require supporting multiple distributions of the 'same' Linux
operating system.
READ: Again, Linux fragmentation is a terrible tragedy that will never
happen to Solaris.
The economics just don't work. IBM claims it is financially justifiable
to consolidate as few as 20 Linux servers on a z800(11). With an estimated
starting price of $400,000 for a z800(12) with a single CPU engine enabled,
that claim seems exaggerated compared to Linux servers that hover in the $1,000
to $2,000 range. Sun's rack-optimized 1U form factor servers start at list
prices under $1,000. When customers realize Linux on mainframe utilization
will be low, and administration costs have still not been factored in, you
can begin to see how the costs will add up. And let's not forget the support
costs that will need to be purchased, either from the distributor or IBM Global
Services. One example of a distributor's cost on an IBM Multiprise ran in
the tens of thousands for the initial services and thousands a month for ongoing
service(13).
READ: Even if "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM",
we whish the same could be said about Sun.
Thus, when considering consolidation projects, why consider putting workloads
onto a completely different and more expensive architecture? Why put an open
operating system such as Linux on a closed proprietary mainframe? Why consolidate
on a system with limited application support and one that demands a rare combination
of skills?
READ: IBM is double-plus uncool amongst geeks. SUN is the hip thing
to use in IT!!!
Obviously I didn't like it there, so I left. One less anglo to "deny" les Quebecois their version of manifest destiny by voting "non" in the next Neverendum. Of course, this also means one less taxpayer filling the public trough to the tune of some CA$25000 a year (and that's just in Quebec).
Bon débarras. (for the french-impaired: good-riddance).
And to those who shout "ethnic cleansing", I'll answer "Manitoba".
(For those who are history impaired, Manitoba was the second french province of Canada, which was then militarly ran over by orangists who got rid of it's rulers and they unilateraly changed it into an english province). Canada had it's civil wars, too, earler and more often than the US.
and yes, tax dollars do go to pay people to go around with rulers measuring the height of English words).
That's the kind of rubbish that is carried about by trashy newspapers such as Zie Gazette (Daß montrëal rhödesishe zeigtung). The Office de la langue françaiseSOLELY relies on delation from citizens when it comes to prosecute a company (not a human individual) who posts a COMMERCIAL sign not written in french.
It has done so in this case by holding that a billboard erected by a customer with an axe to grind is not an "advertisment". Advertisements, as commercial speech, are not entitled to the same degree of deference and protection under the Charter as "political" or socially motivated speech. There is a significant difference between the two under Canadian law.
This is why the law prohibiting non-french signs in Québec is valid, because it only applies to commercial signs.
The actual law in Quebec doesn't forbid signs in English, what it does say is that the sign also has to be in French, and the French has to be bigger.
It also applies only to commercial signs. Individuals (that is, humans - to whom human rights apply) are allowed to post signs in whatever language they want.
That's right... Quebec outlawed one of the two official languages of Canada, notwithstanding the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, of course. And there wasn't a damned thing anyone could do in the judicial challenge and review process, because the Notwithstanding Clause was built right into the Charter itself and had constitutional authority.
According to both the 1867 and the 1982 constitutions, language is solely a provincial jurisdiction. The federal government's proclamation of two official languages in canada only binds the federal government into providing services in both french and english (never mind the 20 or so aboriginal languages in use in canada).
For the last quarter millenium, since canada was conquered by the britshit, the invaders have worked very hard at trying to diminish the number of french people within canada. The principal means of doing so was enounced back in 1827 by judge Sewell:
We have to bury those french people under a flood of [english]immigration.
At the end of the 1960s, the situation was alarming: immigrants to Québec, which is above 80% french, were simply refusing to integrate into the french society, but instead went towards the english minority en masse.
The reason was simple: in canada, the french are treated just like the blacks are treated in the USA; but unlike with race, one can change his language. So, just as no immigrant to the US would turn into a black, no immigrant turned into french when they immigrated to Québec, since the english had all the power and the money.
So, in 1977, the National Assembly of Québec passed bill 101 which made french the sole official language of Québec (and this is fully according to the 1867 britshit north america act). Two of the most controversial provisions of the bill are aimed straight at the immigtants:
Commercial signs in any other language than french are illegal (except for cultural entreprises, such as bookstores, concerts ads, and the like). Humans are allowed to post signs in whatever language they want, it's the companies/croporations who aren't allowed to.
No one can send his children to english school if he did not himself attend english school in Québec.
The idea is that the immigrants can no longer get the notion that they can live in Québec without knowing french.
25 years after the law was passed, we have finally seen the decline of french in QUébec being reversed, which was the principal aim of bill 101.
Of course, now that the principal weapon for eliminating the french from canada had been irremediably blunted, the english declared open season on those laws. Yet, time after time, they have been found in their essence totally conformant to the constitutional laws that had been rammed down the throat of Québec in 1867 and 1982, even though they had been nicked here and there (like the "Québec" clause for schools had been replaced by "Canada").
Another weapon against language laws is the continuous blatant disinformation that comes from the canadian mainstream media, as it is well illustrated by the totally clueless post I am answering to. The individual laments the loss of a right by a commercial entity; something that is not even remotely human cannot claim to have human rights.
In Québec, a store cannot advertise it's wares in english anymore than one cannot put-up a 50 meter high billboard in Vermont. But a store can say whatever it wants as long as it is done in french (and within the truth in advertising laws); there is no curbing of speech anymore than by prohibiting gigantic billboards.
This supreme court ruling was (as far as I can see) a resolution of a conflict between a municipal bylaw and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
If you took the time to read the judgment, you'd know that the insurance company obtained an injunction against the billboard poster.
The fact of the matter is that without the deal with IBM to supply DOS for the PC, Microsoft would probably have been a low-end language shop that petered out around 1984 or so. IBM made Microsoft, but unfortunately did not have the corporate vision to keep the evil genie in the bottle.
No, it is just evolution in action: the big dinosaur got bit by the quick-acting mammal.
The day Gary Kildall went flying is the saddest day in the history of the computer industry.
And we would now be vilifying Digital Research instead of Microsoft...
The writers of the consitituion understood this, and did their best to minimize the tendancy, but they knew that eventually another revolution would be necessary. What they didn't forsee was that technology would evolve that would make future revolutions virtually impossible. The technology for keeping a population under surveillance was unimaginable at the time.
The other thing they couldn't forsee was the level of propoganda and willful ignorance that is achievable with a TV nation.
At the time when the US constitution was written, only very few people (landowners) had the right to vote. The rest of those who, today, would have the right to vote, didn't have the right.
So, it is safe to say, the US constitution was based on a more restricted (and, supposedly more informed) electorate than today.
Its called law enforcement, before cameras were all over, Police were all over.
I'd rather see police all over the place; at least, that would give gainful employment and a purposeful life to all sorts of thugs who otherwise would be indulging in a life of petty crime.
Slashdot Mirror
And having been in the receiving end of racism for so long (the french in Canada are treated just like the blacks are in the US) does wonder in making sure you're not racist.
When the klu-klux-klan tried to setup shop in Montréal some 12 years ago, the neighbours routed them out with baseball bats and generous kicks in the ass. They vanished under the rock they crawled from, never to be seen again...
What few racial tensions there are more likely to come from immigrants who have been told by the federal government that Québec is english and are suddenly surprised, when they arrive, to find out that it is french.
And other racial tensions come from the ineptness of the federal government immigration policies who will do blatantly stupid things like house a boatload of turkish refugees in a predominantly greek neighbourhood; in that case, the ethnic tensions are strictly constrained within the ethnic communities...
Otherwise, for the french it is considered good to date someone who is of a different race, but, again, the whites find themselves discriminated against by the immigrants... (It's **HARD** to date orientals!!!!)
School is absolutely *free* until college, and then college is dirt-cheap (on the order of $800-$1200 per semester) for top-notch universities (does the name "Mc-Gill" rings a bell?).You can become a medical doctor for less than $50,000 (and I'm not talking US dollars)...
Québec language laws are there only to insure that immigrants don't get the notion that they can expect to be living in Québec without knowing french.
Like Germany, where macrovision is illegal.
And it's hardly anything new, there is one that has been running for 30 years at the West-Virginia University, in Morgantown (WV - duh?). (Better pics here).
READ: Of course, with an infinite amount of money, every business problem is solvable at the highest profit for the problem-solver...
READ: But Sun is of the opinion that it's proprietary servers, running with proprietary hardware (such as the special disk drives with the "magic" secret partition table, and the memory chips with the notch moved 1/10 inch) and, of course, running proprietary Solaris Operating System is the best solution overall, especially if you have an infinite amount of money to throw at YOUR problem...
READ: Definitely, here, we have a blatant attempt at fitting an hexagonal peg into a pentagonal hole. Linux was conceived to run on discarded low-end hardware in order to satisfy teenage-geek impulses, which is quite a different thing than to run on the Big Iron dinosaurs IBM is well-known for.
READ: You just can't run JCL and CICS and MVS and CMS and Assembler on Linux. Cobol (even GNU-Cobol) will make the kernel break into hysterics.
READ: On the other hand, Solaris is designed to run (well) solely on Sparc architecture that made Sun famous.
READ: Of course, you don't have any of those virtual machine nonsense with Sun products: you simply plug in as many boxes as you need of machines. No more software headaches for your operators!!!
READ: Why do in software what can be done far more profitably (and piracy-immune!) in juicy, expensi^h^h^h^h^h^h^h profitable hardware?
READ: Of course, you can dynamically add and remove ressources from a Sun cluster with the use of specially trained monkeys and servoids, which is a better proposition than software hocus-pocusery within the deep, dark bowels of an IBM mainframe.
READ: Of course, Sun cannot take advantage of Parallel Sysplex clustering either, but that's more alphabet soup to muddy the waters and instill doubts into potential buyers.
READ: Again, Linux fragmentation is a terrible tragedy that will never happen to Solaris.
READ: Even if " nobody ever got fired for buying IBM ", we whish the same could be said about Sun.
READ: IBM is double-plus uncool amongst geeks. SUN is the hip thing to use in IT!!!
And to those who shout "ethnic cleansing", I'll answer "Manitoba".
(For those who are history impaired, Manitoba was the second french province of Canada, which was then militarly ran over by orangists who got rid of it's rulers and they unilateraly changed it into an english province). Canada had it's civil wars, too, earler and more often than the US.
For the last quarter millenium, since canada was conquered by the britshit, the invaders have worked very hard at trying to diminish the number of french people within canada. The principal means of doing so was enounced back in 1827 by judge Sewell:
At the end of the 1960s, the situation was alarming: immigrants to Québec, which is above 80% french, were simply refusing to integrate into the french society, but instead went towards the english minority en masse.The reason was simple: in canada, the french are treated just like the blacks are treated in the USA; but unlike with race, one can change his language. So, just as no immigrant to the US would turn into a black, no immigrant turned into french when they immigrated to Québec, since the english had all the power and the money.
So, in 1977, the National Assembly of Québec passed bill 101 which made french the sole official language of Québec (and this is fully according to the 1867 britshit north america act). Two of the most controversial provisions of the bill are aimed straight at the immigtants:
- Commercial signs in any other language than french are illegal (except for cultural entreprises, such as bookstores, concerts ads, and the like).
- No one can send his children to english school if he did not himself attend english school in Québec.
The idea is that the immigrants can no longer get the notion that they can live in Québec without knowing french.Humans are allowed to post signs in whatever language they want, it's the companies/croporations who aren't allowed to.
25 years after the law was passed, we have finally seen the decline of french in QUébec being reversed, which was the principal aim of bill 101.
Of course, now that the principal weapon for eliminating the french from canada had been irremediably blunted, the english declared open season on those laws. Yet, time after time, they have been found in their essence totally conformant to the constitutional laws that had been rammed down the throat of Québec in 1867 and 1982, even though they had been nicked here and there (like the "Québec" clause for schools had been replaced by "Canada"). Another weapon against language laws is the continuous blatant disinformation that comes from the canadian mainstream media, as it is well illustrated by the totally clueless post I am answering to. The individual laments the loss of a right by a commercial entity; something that is not even remotely human cannot claim to have human rights.
In Québec, a store cannot advertise it's wares in english anymore than one cannot put-up a 50 meter high billboard in Vermont. But a store can say whatever it wants as long as it is done in french (and within the truth in advertising laws); there is no curbing of speech anymore than by prohibiting gigantic billboards.
Premier message posté!
So, it is safe to say, the US constitution was based on a more restricted (and, supposedly more informed) electorate than today.
Just pay cash. That's totally untraceable.