Well, they would be if they were locally produced and harvested at just the right time. But when you factor in harvesting just a little too early, packaging in an inert atmosphere, shipping around the world and then taking another few days to get distributed to the store...
Guys who are good, especially really creative programmers tend to be impossible to work with until they are in their mid 20s, if someone doesn't believe they are God at 19, they've probably not got the meager talent required to impress themselves and aren't going to be much good anyway.
I think you're missing out on something here. There are plenty of people who are very intelligent but who lack self-confidence, perhaps the guy/girl you're talking to was bullied throughout their younger years and has come to look at anything he/she does as simple and useless or perhaps they are merely comparing themselves to the best of the best, I know I sure did that in my teens, I didn't compare what I could create to the things my peers created, I compared it to what the "legends" of the computing world created. And when you're comparing your own little 2D game to Quake and some little utility program you just wrote to something like TeX or the Linux kernel it's easy to feel like you are completely unskilled.
Sadly there are plenty of crummy microwaves that will cause trouble with your wifi, at least if your access point is near the microwave. I saw this pretty frequently while working tech support a bunch of years back (right around the time when everyone wanted wireless even if their computer was next to their NAT router).
Now, I didn't ever see it be the only source of signal loss but for those who already had a fairly weak signal placing the AP near the microwave did occasionally result in their connection dropping every time they used the microwave.
So I suspect it's more a matter of crappier microwaves interfering just a little, but just a little is enough when you already have a bad signal (and what really bothered me was how few users were able to figure out the correlation between "turn microwave on" and "wifi stops working").
But it's.. it's... it's... AGILE! (Or something, for some reason those who jump on every new trend and who have been screaming about "agile" development even where it doesn't make any sense have also thrown themselves at replacing version numbers with either dates or funny names for their releases, only thing worse than that is the ever classic "The fix is in CVS/Just grab it from the repo" answer from project maintainers too lazy to make a new release on at least a yearly basis)
Well, as it turns out, every year we are able to do a whole lot of things more efficiently with fewer workers which means more people are competing for the remaining jobs.
Of course, as a society we are also counteracting this in various ways but we're still unlikely to ever return to the "golden days" of the years between just after WW2 up to somewhere around the early to mid-70s when a single person could support an entire family's middle-class lifestyle and jobs were not just plentiful but as my dad put it "If we didn't like the job we'd just quit and get a job at the place down the street the next day" (When I was fresh out of college and looking for work he couldn't comprehend how it could be hard for someone with a college education to find a job, when he was that age there were plenty of jobs available, many of these with clear career paths).
Yeah, that kind of makes it not part of ISO 3166. The only ones I've seen use "EU" for all of Europe have been people who failed to understand the difference between the EU and Europe.
If it's a real person who's over 18 but looks 12 it will still be legal.
If it's a real person who's 17 but looks 20, it will still be legal.
If it's a fictional character that is 50 but looks 12, it's illegal.
If it's a fictional character that is 18 according to the swedish version of the game but 17 according to every other version of the game then most likely it would be illegal as it would be clear that the age was changed simply to avoid the swedish legal system.
This isn't about prudishness in the "ZOMG A BREAST!!1 THINK OF THE CHILDREN!! AAAAAAH!!!111one" sense.
This is about the usual child porn hysteria. Here in Sweden our politicians were chasing easy points with the public and pushed through various laws against child porn that basically made erotic drawings of someone who could be considered to be a child illegal. That is, it doesn't have to be a real person. In retrospective the only people who seem to like this law are the politicians.
Yes, I was just about to make my own post about how this is clearly biased in favor of FSF licenses.
BSD is one of the more popular open source licenses out there yet the FSF consistently either pretends it doesn't exist or tells people the GPL is better.
I was not implying that I knew all there was to know of my first computer, merely that back in those days there was a certain feeling associated with learning things about your computer, a feeling with quite some basis in reality, a feeling that you could actually achieve a sort of holistic view of the whole machine, hardware and software.
Uh, I'm not calling writing a driver a black art. I'm saying that these days you can't understand the CPU, the GPU, the OS, all the built-in software, all the I/O hardware built in and all the other little bits and pieces to the degree that you could understand a machine like the C64. Those machines were a lot less complex and that did have a certain charm, you could actually learn "everything" there was to know about them, you just can't do that with a machine where just the CPU has over a billion transistors (compared to the 6510 which had something like 3,500 - 4,000 transistors).
So, you know all the "standard" APIs for your operating system of choice by heart? (I mean really know, as in, you don't even have to look things up, you should know every member of every class and so on)
And I assume you also know every hardware component in intricate detail, every opcode for your CPU, including the undocumented ones. Exactly how to communicate with every controller and I/O chip in your machine using asm?
Because that's the level of knowledge that was at least possible back in the days of the C64, SV-328 and other home computers like them. There were people who really knew almost that much about their computer, they could list the CPU opcodes and what they did, they could explain how the disk controller was designed, they knew about the weird quirks in the BASIC interpreter that came loaded on the computer's ROM chip, they knew that the disk controller had a little RAM in it that could be used and all those things.
I'lll stand by my statement that these days, with a normal desktop computer, it just is not possible for a human being to understand the computer in that way.
Well, one thing I sort of miss is the feeling of it actually being possible to truly understand the computer as a whole, those days are long gone. Back in the days of the C64 and similar machines you really could understand your computer to a point where you had more knowledge about it than was in the reference manuals for the various components it was made up from.
Today most of your computer, both hardware and software, is a black box with layer upon layer of abstraction. It's more powerful and easier to program but large parts will always remain unknown, there is simply too much you'd need to know with an operating system several gigabytes in size and single hardware components more complex than entire computers in the era of the C64.
I'm going to go with the quote from my other post here, ”he had sex with me. He wasn’t hurting me and he wasn’t forceful or mean or anything like that, and really I just tried to let him get it over with.”.
While it's still wrong it sure doesn't sound like "beat her into submission" fits either.
I won't try to defend Polanski having a sex with/raping/whatever a 13 year old girl. I will however ask you and those modding you up to actually read about the specifics about the case.
In the words of the girl years later: "he had sex with me. He wasn’t hurting me and he wasn’t forceful or mean or anything like that, and really I just tried to let him get it over with."
Oh, and of course about the legal quagmire that resulted in him fleeing the US (once again, the girl): "My views as a victim, my feelings as a victim, or my desires as a victim were never considered or even inquired into by the district attorney prior to the filing. It is clear to me that because the district attorney's office has been accused of wrongdoing, it has recited the lurid details of the case to distract attention from the wrongful conduct of the district attorney's office as well as the judge who was then assigned to the case."
Basically it seems that she never considered herself a ”victim”. Also, IIRC Polanski did plead guilty to something like ”sexual misconduct with a minor” as part of a settlement and everyone was ok with sentencing him to a slap on the wrist and then at the very last minute the prosecution and judge decided to go ahead and pursue all six counts of criminal behaviour.
There were plenty of graphics cards capable of 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 back in those days. Heck, with 4 MiB of video RAM (4,194,304 bytes) you could use 12 bits per pixel and still have enough memory for 1920x1080 (2,073,600 pixels). Not exactly truecolor but it does allow you to use a palette of 4096 colors.
Then there are of course issues such as sync frequencies but I suspect such things could be worked around pretty easily (back then you pretty much wanted 72+ Hz vertical sync unless you enjoyed pain).
You get a lot more light for your money if you buy HPS and MH lights (I'm not talking power consumption here, I'm talking about purchasing the lights).
For a professional grower it might make sense but overall HPS lights just give you more of a bang for your buck.
Plus, ipv4 is easy to manage; your average network engineer has IPs memorized for when things break, or at least a somewhat logical addressing scheme so it's super-easy to guess the IP of a specific component when DNS breaks or is inaccessible, to be able to log into the device and fix it.
So, you've got xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:/48 for your small business (I'm going with a small single-office business for this example's sake, if you have multiple offices you can probably just get a prefix per office and another one for your central server room and the backup server room). What you could do is something so deceptively simple as taking say, xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:1:/64 and putting your servers there with static IPs. So now the office gateway is xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:1::1, the primary DNS is xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:1::10, the secondary DNS is xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:1::11 and whatever you're comfortable with.
By the same hardline reasoning no CxO or political leader is truly indispensable either. However, it is very likely that they are valuable enough to their employer that if their employer should do all in its power to keep them on board, even if that means paying them what seems to be a lot more than the going market rate for someone doing the job that person is doing.
I'm definitely not saying this goes for everyone, but I can definitely see a few types of startup companies in which the IT guy is pretty much valuable enough to the company that having to replace him would be a major financial hit to the company (hell, I've been the outsourced helldesk monkey for a couple of organizations that were very much "IT companies" yet only had one or two people working for them full-time that actually knew anything at all about the technical sides of their business, those people were very very valuable to those companies since no one else there really understood what the company did and was either a manager of the PHB variety, a "money person"/investor or involved in marketing or sales).
Not really, most companies do this, when they buy something it has a planned lifetime. A desk might have a planned lifetime of ten years, a chair might be expected to last five years and a computer three years.
This also means that barring sudden economic hardships the company puts replacements into the budget even if the hardware in question is still in perfect working order.
It's kind of like how you don't see your local UPS man drive around in an ancient truck because "it's still working" (based on some calculation that looks at the cost of downtime should it break, the cost of repairs and when it becomes less expensive to simply replace the truck), chances are he's driving a truck that was bought when the previous one was written off.
The larger the company the more likely it is that things are handled this way (a small startup is more likely to try to save a few bucks, a large multinational corporation is more concerned with keeping things running smoothly and they run a lot more smoothly if you simply schedule hardware replacements rather than try to keep every machine running as long as possible).
How is a more integrated machine more likely to make a company that is already unlikely to have their highly trained IT staff even bother to swap out a PSU or hard drive suddenly have an increased interest in swapping out similar parts?
Most businesses, including those with their own IT department, don't replace hardware inside computers, they keep a few spare units on hand and send busted ones back to whoever they bought them from.
So to most businesses this really isn't an issue. Especially considering that they tend to write computers off in two or three years (at which point they buy new ones as the old ones are "worn out" on paper).
So you are trying to say in a very convoluted way that the school system is inadequate preparation for university? I don't know of a single school system in the world which is an adequate preparation for university. Some get by by brutally selecting students from an early age -- of course, you get all the brilliant kids who would have made it through in any system, so it works. duh.
Wouldn't have been so convoluted had you actually read my original post instead of prattled on about some imagined post where I supposedly complained about there being too much math in CS or whatever it was you took away from it...
But the point remains, the university requirements you describe are in fact correct. And unless the failure rate in the Swedish university system are abnormally high, it might well be that the high school does an okay job at preparation. But then, I also believe that exposure to subjects is valuable in and of itself, never mind that you pass the class. So yes, it might seem unfair that the guy who did so much math, and nothing else, doesn't get to enter the programme, but on the other hand, very narrow interests show him to be inadequate for university.
The university requirements don't make sense because the swedish high school system (at the time anyway) worked in such a way that you chose a "program" with a set of courses and in practice there was only one program out of a whole bunch (including national and local programs for more specialized schools) that actually ended up with you being qualified for engineering or hard science university programs. I myself made the mistake at age 15 (when you choose your program for HS) to pick one which focused on digital electronics and computers, the school claimed that this program would lead to being qualified for CS programs except of course they didn't have any chemistry courses which meant most schools wouldn't take me because they had a blanket requirement that covered the minimum requirements for all the engineering and hard science programs, there was no legal reason for this, it's just easier for the school to go with "let's just use national template f.2.1, it covers math, chemistry, physics, social studies, english..." without considering that most students won't have taken all those courses and those courses aren't all necessary (sure, math is necessary for most but chemistry isn't necessary for CS, physics really isn't either, chemistry isn't really necessary for college-level physics and so on, they were really just being lazy).
In the end I did find schools that had taken a bit more care in their choice of criteria for acceptance into their programs but many at the time didn't really differentiate between the criteria for various engineering programs and hard science programs, they all had the same very narrow set of qualifications.
So yes, I've taken basic literature classes and all those things in HS and while I was a university student I also took some "artsy" courses (in fact I took over two semesters of image production courses because I ended up finding the subject interesting).
Also, the purpose of university studies (at least as described in various legal documents here in Sweden) is not to make young people into well-rounded individuals, that's what HS is for. University studies are legally speaking meant to prepare students for further studies leading up to a career in research (of course, in practice most don't go that route but unlike in the US there is not nearly as much focus on making students well-rounded and exposing them to different subjects, that is something that is supposed to happen on a HS level).
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Well, they would be if they were locally produced and harvested at just the right time. But when you factor in harvesting just a little too early, packaging in an inert atmosphere, shipping around the world and then taking another few days to get distributed to the store...
Guys who are good, especially really creative programmers tend to be impossible to work with until they are in their mid 20s, if someone doesn't believe they are God at 19, they've probably not got the meager talent required to impress themselves and aren't going to be much good anyway.
I think you're missing out on something here. There are plenty of people who are very intelligent but who lack self-confidence, perhaps the guy/girl you're talking to was bullied throughout their younger years and has come to look at anything he/she does as simple and useless or perhaps they are merely comparing themselves to the best of the best, I know I sure did that in my teens, I didn't compare what I could create to the things my peers created, I compared it to what the "legends" of the computing world created. And when you're comparing your own little 2D game to Quake and some little utility program you just wrote to something like TeX or the Linux kernel it's easy to feel like you are completely unskilled.
Sadly there are plenty of crummy microwaves that will cause trouble with your wifi, at least if your access point is near the microwave. I saw this pretty frequently while working tech support a bunch of years back (right around the time when everyone wanted wireless even if their computer was next to their NAT router).
Now, I didn't ever see it be the only source of signal loss but for those who already had a fairly weak signal placing the AP near the microwave did occasionally result in their connection dropping every time they used the microwave.
So I suspect it's more a matter of crappier microwaves interfering just a little, but just a little is enough when you already have a bad signal (and what really bothered me was how few users were able to figure out the correlation between "turn microwave on" and "wifi stops working").
But it's.. it's... it's... AGILE! (Or something, for some reason those who jump on every new trend and who have been screaming about "agile" development even where it doesn't make any sense have also thrown themselves at replacing version numbers with either dates or funny names for their releases, only thing worse than that is the ever classic "The fix is in CVS/Just grab it from the repo" answer from project maintainers too lazy to make a new release on at least a yearly basis)
Well, as it turns out, every year we are able to do a whole lot of things more efficiently with fewer workers which means more people are competing for the remaining jobs.
Of course, as a society we are also counteracting this in various ways but we're still unlikely to ever return to the "golden days" of the years between just after WW2 up to somewhere around the early to mid-70s when a single person could support an entire family's middle-class lifestyle and jobs were not just plentiful but as my dad put it "If we didn't like the job we'd just quit and get a job at the place down the street the next day" (When I was fresh out of college and looking for work he couldn't comprehend how it could be hard for someone with a college education to find a job, when he was that age there were plenty of jobs available, many of these with clear career paths).
[...] (non official) variants of ISO 3166, [...]
Yeah, that kind of makes it not part of ISO 3166. The only ones I've seen use "EU" for all of Europe have been people who failed to understand the difference between the EU and Europe.
EU = European Union. It never means Europe.
EUR = Euro, currency, not a continent.
Actually it's not as simple as that.
If it's a real person who's over 18 but looks 12 it will still be legal.
If it's a real person who's 17 but looks 20, it will still be legal.
If it's a fictional character that is 50 but looks 12, it's illegal.
If it's a fictional character that is 18 according to the swedish version of the game but 17 according to every other version of the game then most likely it would be illegal as it would be clear that the age was changed simply to avoid the swedish legal system.
Of course, IANAL but I am swedish.
This isn't about prudishness in the "ZOMG A BREAST!!1 THINK OF THE CHILDREN!! AAAAAAH!!!111one" sense.
This is about the usual child porn hysteria. Here in Sweden our politicians were chasing easy points with the public and pushed through various laws against child porn that basically made erotic drawings of someone who could be considered to be a child illegal. That is, it doesn't have to be a real person. In retrospective the only people who seem to like this law are the politicians.
Yes, I was just about to make my own post about how this is clearly biased in favor of FSF licenses.
BSD is one of the more popular open source licenses out there yet the FSF consistently either pretends it doesn't exist or tells people the GPL is better.
Hello Mr. Troll.
I was not implying that I knew all there was to know of my first computer, merely that back in those days there was a certain feeling associated with learning things about your computer, a feeling with quite some basis in reality, a feeling that you could actually achieve a sort of holistic view of the whole machine, hardware and software.
Uh, I'm not calling writing a driver a black art. I'm saying that these days you can't understand the CPU, the GPU, the OS, all the built-in software, all the I/O hardware built in and all the other little bits and pieces to the degree that you could understand a machine like the C64. Those machines were a lot less complex and that did have a certain charm, you could actually learn "everything" there was to know about them, you just can't do that with a machine where just the CPU has over a billion transistors (compared to the 6510 which had something like 3,500 - 4,000 transistors).
So, you know all the "standard" APIs for your operating system of choice by heart? (I mean really know, as in, you don't even have to look things up, you should know every member of every class and so on)
And I assume you also know every hardware component in intricate detail, every opcode for your CPU, including the undocumented ones. Exactly how to communicate with every controller and I/O chip in your machine using asm?
Because that's the level of knowledge that was at least possible back in the days of the C64, SV-328 and other home computers like them. There were people who really knew almost that much about their computer, they could list the CPU opcodes and what they did, they could explain how the disk controller was designed, they knew about the weird quirks in the BASIC interpreter that came loaded on the computer's ROM chip, they knew that the disk controller had a little RAM in it that could be used and all those things.
I'lll stand by my statement that these days, with a normal desktop computer, it just is not possible for a human being to understand the computer in that way.
Well, one thing I sort of miss is the feeling of it actually being possible to truly understand the computer as a whole, those days are long gone. Back in the days of the C64 and similar machines you really could understand your computer to a point where you had more knowledge about it than was in the reference manuals for the various components it was made up from.
Today most of your computer, both hardware and software, is a black box with layer upon layer of abstraction. It's more powerful and easier to program but large parts will always remain unknown, there is simply too much you'd need to know with an operating system several gigabytes in size and single hardware components more complex than entire computers in the era of the C64.
I'm going to go with the quote from my other post here, ”he had sex with me. He wasn’t hurting me and he wasn’t forceful or mean or anything like that, and really I just tried to let him get it over with.”.
While it's still wrong it sure doesn't sound like "beat her into submission" fits either.
I won't try to defend Polanski having a sex with/raping/whatever a 13 year old girl. I will however ask you and those modding you up to actually read about the specifics about the case.
In the words of the girl years later: "he had sex with me. He wasn’t hurting me and he wasn’t forceful or mean or anything like that, and really I just tried to let him get it over with."
Oh, and of course about the legal quagmire that resulted in him fleeing the US (once again, the girl): "My views as a victim, my feelings as a victim, or my desires as a victim were never considered or even inquired into by the district attorney prior to the filing. It is clear to me that because the district attorney's office has been accused of wrongdoing, it has recited the lurid details of the case to distract attention from the wrongful conduct of the district attorney's office as well as the judge who was then assigned to the case."
Basically it seems that she never considered herself a ”victim”. Also, IIRC Polanski did plead guilty to something like ”sexual misconduct with a minor” as part of a settlement and everyone was ok with sentencing him to a slap on the wrist and then at the very last minute the prosecution and judge decided to go ahead and pursue all six counts of criminal behaviour .
There were plenty of graphics cards capable of 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 back in those days. Heck, with 4 MiB of video RAM (4,194,304 bytes) you could use 12 bits per pixel and still have enough memory for 1920x1080 (2,073,600 pixels). Not exactly truecolor but it does allow you to use a palette of 4096 colors.
Then there are of course issues such as sync frequencies but I suspect such things could be worked around pretty easily (back then you pretty much wanted 72+ Hz vertical sync unless you enjoyed pain).
You could vectorize the original graphics, edit the vector graphics and then finally export to a higher-res raster format.
The problem is the price.
You get a lot more light for your money if you buy HPS and MH lights (I'm not talking power consumption here, I'm talking about purchasing the lights).
For a professional grower it might make sense but overall HPS lights just give you more of a bang for your buck.
Plus, ipv4 is easy to manage; your average network engineer has IPs memorized for when things break, or at least a somewhat logical addressing scheme so it's super-easy to guess the IP of a specific component when DNS breaks or is inaccessible, to be able to log into the device and fix it.
So, you've got xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:/48 for your small business (I'm going with a small single-office business for this example's sake, if you have multiple offices you can probably just get a prefix per office and another one for your central server room and the backup server room). What you could do is something so deceptively simple as taking say, xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:1:/64 and putting your servers there with static IPs. So now the office gateway is xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:1::1, the primary DNS is xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:1::10, the secondary DNS is xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:1::11 and whatever you're comfortable with.
By the same hardline reasoning no CxO or political leader is truly indispensable either. However, it is very likely that they are valuable enough to their employer that if their employer should do all in its power to keep them on board, even if that means paying them what seems to be a lot more than the going market rate for someone doing the job that person is doing.
I'm definitely not saying this goes for everyone, but I can definitely see a few types of startup companies in which the IT guy is pretty much valuable enough to the company that having to replace him would be a major financial hit to the company (hell, I've been the outsourced helldesk monkey for a couple of organizations that were very much "IT companies" yet only had one or two people working for them full-time that actually knew anything at all about the technical sides of their business, those people were very very valuable to those companies since no one else there really understood what the company did and was either a manager of the PHB variety, a "money person"/investor or involved in marketing or sales).
Not really, most companies do this, when they buy something it has a planned lifetime. A desk might have a planned lifetime of ten years, a chair might be expected to last five years and a computer three years.
This also means that barring sudden economic hardships the company puts replacements into the budget even if the hardware in question is still in perfect working order.
It's kind of like how you don't see your local UPS man drive around in an ancient truck because "it's still working" (based on some calculation that looks at the cost of downtime should it break, the cost of repairs and when it becomes less expensive to simply replace the truck), chances are he's driving a truck that was bought when the previous one was written off.
The larger the company the more likely it is that things are handled this way (a small startup is more likely to try to save a few bucks, a large multinational corporation is more concerned with keeping things running smoothly and they run a lot more smoothly if you simply schedule hardware replacements rather than try to keep every machine running as long as possible).
How is a more integrated machine more likely to make a company that is already unlikely to have their highly trained IT staff even bother to swap out a PSU or hard drive suddenly have an increased interest in swapping out similar parts?
Most businesses, including those with their own IT department, don't replace hardware inside computers, they keep a few spare units on hand and send busted ones back to whoever they bought them from.
So to most businesses this really isn't an issue. Especially considering that they tend to write computers off in two or three years (at which point they buy new ones as the old ones are "worn out" on paper).
So you are trying to say in a very convoluted way that the school system is inadequate preparation for university? I don't know of a single school system in the world which is an adequate preparation for university. Some get by by brutally selecting students from an early age -- of course, you get all the brilliant kids who would have made it through in any system, so it works. duh.
Wouldn't have been so convoluted had you actually read my original post instead of prattled on about some imagined post where I supposedly complained about there being too much math in CS or whatever it was you took away from it...
But the point remains, the university requirements you describe are in fact correct. And unless the failure rate in the Swedish university system are abnormally high, it might well be that the high school does an okay job at preparation. But then, I also believe that exposure to subjects is valuable in and of itself, never mind that you pass the class. So yes, it might seem unfair that the guy who did so much math, and nothing else, doesn't get to enter the programme, but on the other hand, very narrow interests show him to be inadequate for university.
The university requirements don't make sense because the swedish high school system (at the time anyway) worked in such a way that you chose a "program" with a set of courses and in practice there was only one program out of a whole bunch (including national and local programs for more specialized schools) that actually ended up with you being qualified for engineering or hard science university programs. I myself made the mistake at age 15 (when you choose your program for HS) to pick one which focused on digital electronics and computers, the school claimed that this program would lead to being qualified for CS programs except of course they didn't have any chemistry courses which meant most schools wouldn't take me because they had a blanket requirement that covered the minimum requirements for all the engineering and hard science programs, there was no legal reason for this, it's just easier for the school to go with "let's just use national template f.2.1, it covers math, chemistry, physics, social studies, english..." without considering that most students won't have taken all those courses and those courses aren't all necessary (sure, math is necessary for most but chemistry isn't necessary for CS, physics really isn't either, chemistry isn't really necessary for college-level physics and so on, they were really just being lazy).
In the end I did find schools that had taken a bit more care in their choice of criteria for acceptance into their programs but many at the time didn't really differentiate between the criteria for various engineering programs and hard science programs, they all had the same very narrow set of qualifications.
So yes, I've taken basic literature classes and all those things in HS and while I was a university student I also took some "artsy" courses (in fact I took over two semesters of image production courses because I ended up finding the subject interesting).
Also, the purpose of university studies (at least as described in various legal documents here in Sweden) is not to make young people into well-rounded individuals, that's what HS is for. University studies are legally speaking meant to prepare students for further studies leading up to a career in research (of course, in practice most don't go that route but unlike in the US there is not nearly as much focus on making students well-rounded and exposing them to different subjects, that is something that is supposed to happen on a HS level).