Your post really only shows how ignorant you are of economics. The Canadian and US dollars are not equal in value, nor should they be. You wouldn't expect a British Pound to be equal in value to a French Franc, right? There is no rule that says a Canadian Dollar should equal the value of an American Dollar. It's amazing that they are even this close to being equal.
Currencies rise and fall due to international trade and, to some extent, to the monetary policies of the governments involved. Normally if Canada's currency decreases in value next to the US Dollar, then it would be due to increased imports into Canada from the US. However, what really happened was that Canadians, who happen to have a higher rate of savings than Americans, have been investing their money heavily in the US stock markets. To do this, you have to sell Canadian Dollars on the open market, and buy US Dollars. Simple supply and demand tells you that this will make US Dollars more expensive to Canadians.
On the up side, Canadian exports have been looking ever more attractive to US buyers, which has been driving the Canadian economy for the last five or ten years. In essence, Canadians have been trading their goods for stock in US companies. In the future, which of the two items traded will be more apt to appreciate? There is the automobile made in Canada that was sold to the US, or the stock in a US company. I think that the Canadians got the better end of the deal, considering that most of those cars depreciate at around 25% per year, whilst stock prices tend to rise over the long run (economic slowdowns don't last forever).
If you'd like to continue learning about the real world and how it works, I would suggest any first year macroeconomics course, or even a little common sense.
This article is probably written by some "technology reporter" who predicted that Linux was just a passing fad a few years ago. Now Linus is killing Linux... Right.
Looks like Microsoft won't be supporting Java in
any way, anytime soon
I didn't know that Microsoft actually supported Java. When you take a competitor's product, change it slightly so it's not compatible, and call it your own... well, I guess that's just par for the course at Microsoft.
When light is 'stopped', does it decrease in intensity after a while or can it just be stored indefinitely?
There will be some degradation, but if you put the pattern enhancers into a repeating diagnostic loop, it can save the original energy pattern for hundreds of years.
This is a good way to save yourself if you ever crash land on a Dyson Sphere. 8^D
M$ has never made an honest statement, so if they're acknowledging that Linux is a threat, do they *really* mean that it's *no longer* a threat? Shouldn't we be concerned?
But maybe they know that we know and they're just messing with us... but...
I agree that this is very commonly said by OO enthusiasts, but since most people don't believe this, I don't think it qualifies as a myth.
In my experience, writing up a quick program is much more easily done in straight C, and faster too. Most people realize this.
IMHO, the strengths of OO programming only arise when you are writing a code base for *other* people to use, simply because it encapsulates everything and provides an abstracted interface. For instance, when you go to design a GUI, it's much nicer to create a button instance and pass that to a form, than to call a function that puts a button on the screen, and continually have to keep track of all the details.
I think that OOP is actually *harder* because if you do it correctly, you have to think about how others see your interface. This is something that should be done even if you are writing code procedurally, but OOP forces you to do this.
I agree though, that there are other paradigms that are just as good. Anything that promotes modularity and generalization is good. OO is one way of doing this, but normal modular programming habits, peer review, and even structuring your app as separate processes or threads will also help to achieve the same results.
What if I got myself a 'tag', created some kind of work to download, and then set up my computer to download it over and over again? At first you might think that since you're paying for the download and getting paid for it too, you're not gaining anything, but that's not entirely the case.
Consider this - let's say in a single month that the total content downloaded through an ISP is tracked at 1 Gigabyte (for a round number). Let's say, for implicity, that half of this data (or 500 Megs) is actually tagged. Now let's say that the next month, all usage is the same, except that I download my own tagged file 100 times, and it is 1 Megabyte per download. Now the total downloaded bandwidth is 1100 Megs, and 600 Megs of that is tagged.
If each meg of tagged material is supposed to cost, say, $1, then in the previous month, the ISP would charge $0.50 per meg that each user downloads. This month, the ISP would charge 600/1100 or just under $0.55 per meg. So I'm being charged more per meg this month, but I'm getting $1 per meg, and I'm only paying $0.55 for it!!!
Now as for having them trace it back to me, maybe it *isn't* me. Maybe it's my friend doing it, and I'm splitting the money with him. Or maybe it's some anonymous AOL account that's downloading all this work - I don't know.
Yeah, the PQ have never gotten in any trouble for trash talking "ethnics" or jews. Riiight.
You are correct, the PQ have been so accused, but so has the Canadian Alliance, and they are at the opposite end of the political spectrum.
I've got no problem with the average franco, but the Quebecois nationalist movement has a very ugly side, and calling me a racist doesn't make that any less true.
I'm not saying there aren't problems, and I was too harsh in my comments - sorry. Still, we have to keep showing the French that Canada accepts them and their culture (hopefully that doesn't involve any more transfer payments, though:).
And don't forget the whole gun control debate, as of Jan 1 2001 Canadian gun owners had to register themselves, by 2003 (?) we'll have to
register all of our guns. A lot of people aren't doing it; but it is the law of the land.
Why would this be a bad thing? You can own a gun for hunting/sport, etc., but the police want to be able to know about them.
If you got to Quebec, you'll have to put up with bullshit language laws, designed to prop up the (dying) French language. The Franco
establishment in Quebec is isolationist at best, racist at worst.
This is obviously flamebait. At any rate, most of us Canadians know that it isn't the French people that are making the fuss - it's the powerhungry gov't of Quebec. Personally, I think it adds a lot to Canada that we are bilingual. Oh, and as for the French in Quebec being racist, that is absolutely incorrect. The people of Quebec are both welcome and necessary for Canada's identity, and your remark is the real racist sentiment here.
I live in both worlds (the US and Canada) because I live in Canada and work in the US as an engineer. I can tell you that I let out a great sigh of relief every time I return to Canada at night. Canada is truly safer, quieter, and altogether a 'nicer' place to live. I do, however, find my American acquaintances to be wonderful people, but the American society as a whole is a different matter.
The ideals promoted in the US seem to be the 'big brother types' (i.e. conformity, allegiance, etc.). In Canada, diversity is celebrated, and in the US, it is crushed.
I have even been known to compare the current mentality of the US with that of Nazi Germany. I do not believe that this is being too harsh - when nationality takes precedence over humankind, that is a dangerous situation. I can tell you first hand that most Americans consider themselves to be "leaders of the free world" even though many have never travelled outside of their own country or continent.
If I left Vancouver, it is highly unlikely I'd move to the US. I'd probably make a break for Copenhagen, London, or Hamburg instead.
Regarding this statement, and having visited all of these cities (except Vancouver:-) I would have to recommend Hamburg. The beer in Copenhagen is much more expensive, though it is a very fun place too.
I just read on the DSF site that "MessengerA2Z is an advanced instant messaging service that
comes free to you. Its superior functioning is based on the initial
source code made available under GNU GPL license, which
brings together the expertise and knowledge of developers
world-wide."
They also say that the source will be available shortly. I must say that this is a great publicity thing for DSF because I never would have even known about them until they did this.
They are all just going to upload their entire collections en masse.
Actually, you would assume that to partake in this system, you would have to either contribute drive space, or pay for access. Therefore, your "ocean" space is limited by your contribution.
I hate to side with the company that patented one click shopping, but in this case I think that they are the ones being bullied.
When you buy a book, you get one copy, and that copy, unlike the agreements for most software, is yours to own and sell. What Amazon wants to do is get in on a very lucrative business of hooking up buyers and sellers of used books, so they can charge a royalty, probably. This is something that's been going on online for a long time now. There are many campus bulletin boards that went online with used textbooks, for instance.
However, this is not about whether Amazon has the right to sell used books (they do have the right) but it's about the publishers trying to pressure Amazon into only selling new books. In this way, the publishers have banded together to create a kind of monopoly, and are now using that monopoly unfairly against the used book industry.
Why does everyone keep insisting that BetaMax was such a great technology? Just because it delivers better quality pictures doesn't mean it was better suited for the home user. One of the reasons that VHS succeeded over BetaMax was that you could be sure of recording a whole football game on a VHS tape, but you couldn't fit the whole thing on a BetaMax (depending on game length, of course).
Say you had to commute 40 km to work every day, so you go shopping for a car. There's an electric one with lots of cool gadgets, it's better for the environment, and you're even sure that you could tap into your neighbour's electric panel to fuel up on his electricity! Wow! Except that its average range is, perhaps 75 km, so you would consistently have to walk the last 5km home, start unreeling your 5 km long extension cord, go back to the car, plug it in... or move your house 5 km closer to your work.
Sometimes certain features outweigh all the others, and that was probably partly the case in BetaMax.
Actually, one way that normal *hip* places make money is to sell merchandise. People love to wear the logos of their favorite sneaker company, and are willing to pay lots of money for it.
You see, the US is very quick to get 'pissed' whenever another country in the world doesn't do what is asked. Well, no offence to my good US buddies, but the US government can go to h*ll! 8P
Slashdot Mirror
Your post really only shows how ignorant you are of economics. The Canadian and US dollars are not equal in value, nor should they be. You wouldn't expect a British Pound to be equal in value to a French Franc, right? There is no rule that says a Canadian Dollar should equal the value of an American Dollar. It's amazing that they are even this close to being equal.
Currencies rise and fall due to international trade and, to some extent, to the monetary policies of the governments involved. Normally if Canada's currency decreases in value next to the US Dollar, then it would be due to increased imports into Canada from the US. However, what really happened was that Canadians, who happen to have a higher rate of savings than Americans, have been investing their money heavily in the US stock markets. To do this, you have to sell Canadian Dollars on the open market, and buy US Dollars. Simple supply and demand tells you that this will make US Dollars more expensive to Canadians.
On the up side, Canadian exports have been looking ever more attractive to US buyers, which has been driving the Canadian economy for the last five or ten years. In essence, Canadians have been trading their goods for stock in US companies. In the future, which of the two items traded will be more apt to appreciate? There is the automobile made in Canada that was sold to the US, or the stock in a US company. I think that the Canadians got the better end of the deal, considering that most of those cars depreciate at around 25% per year, whilst stock prices tend to rise over the long run (economic slowdowns don't last forever).
If you'd like to continue learning about the real world and how it works, I would suggest any first year macroeconomics course, or even a little common sense.
This article is probably written by some "technology reporter" who predicted that Linux was just a passing fad a few years ago. Now Linus is killing Linux... Right.
Keep up the good work Mr. Torvalds.
I didn't know that Microsoft actually supported Java. When you take a competitor's product, change it slightly so it's not compatible, and call it your own... well, I guess that's just par for the course at Microsoft.
This will go *so* well with my vertical desk chair!
Is that a Quake I see in your pocket, or are you just really excited to see me?
There will be some degradation, but if you put the pattern enhancers into a repeating diagnostic loop, it can save the original energy pattern for hundreds of years.
This is a good way to save yourself if you ever crash land on a Dyson Sphere. 8^D
Does that make it any different than the Prime Minister?
M$ has never made an honest statement, so if they're acknowledging that Linux is a threat, do they *really* mean that it's *no longer* a threat? Shouldn't we be concerned?
But maybe they know that we know and they're just messing with us... but...
My head hurts.
I agree that this is very commonly said by OO enthusiasts, but since most people don't believe this, I don't think it qualifies as a myth.
In my experience, writing up a quick program is much more easily done in straight C, and faster too. Most people realize this.
IMHO, the strengths of OO programming only arise when you are writing a code base for *other* people to use, simply because it encapsulates everything and provides an abstracted interface. For instance, when you go to design a GUI, it's much nicer to create a button instance and pass that to a form, than to call a function that puts a button on the screen, and continually have to keep track of all the details.
I think that OOP is actually *harder* because if you do it correctly, you have to think about how others see your interface. This is something that should be done even if you are writing code procedurally, but OOP forces you to do this.
I agree though, that there are other paradigms that are just as good. Anything that promotes modularity and generalization is good. OO is one way of doing this, but normal modular programming habits, peer review, and even structuring your app as separate processes or threads will also help to achieve the same results.
What if I got myself a 'tag', created some kind of work to download, and then set up my computer to download it over and over again? At first you might think that since you're paying for the download and getting paid for it too, you're not gaining anything, but that's not entirely the case.
Consider this - let's say in a single month that the total content downloaded through an ISP is tracked at 1 Gigabyte (for a round number). Let's say, for implicity, that half of this data (or 500 Megs) is actually tagged. Now let's say that the next month, all usage is the same, except that I download my own tagged file 100 times, and it is 1 Megabyte per download. Now the total downloaded bandwidth is 1100 Megs, and 600 Megs of that is tagged.
If each meg of tagged material is supposed to cost, say, $1, then in the previous month, the ISP would charge $0.50 per meg that each user downloads. This month, the ISP would charge 600/1100 or just under $0.55 per meg. So I'm being charged more per meg this month, but I'm getting $1 per meg, and I'm only paying $0.55 for it!!!
Now as for having them trace it back to me, maybe it *isn't* me. Maybe it's my friend doing it, and I'm splitting the money with him. Or maybe it's some anonymous AOL account that's downloading all this work - I don't know.
But anyway, that's how you hack this system.
Two words: "raiding parties"!!!
You are correct, the PQ have been so accused, but so has the Canadian Alliance, and they are at the opposite end of the political spectrum.
I've got no problem with the average franco, but the Quebecois nationalist movement has a very ugly side, and calling me a racist doesn't make that any less true.I'm not saying there aren't problems, and I was too harsh in my comments - sorry. Still, we have to keep showing the French that Canada accepts them and their culture (hopefully that doesn't involve any more transfer payments, though :).
Why would this be a bad thing? You can own a gun for hunting/sport, etc., but the police want to be able to know about them.
If you got to Quebec, you'll have to put up with bullshit language laws, designed to prop up the (dying) French language. The Franco establishment in Quebec is isolationist at best, racist at worst.This is obviously flamebait. At any rate, most of us Canadians know that it isn't the French people that are making the fuss - it's the powerhungry gov't of Quebec. Personally, I think it adds a lot to Canada that we are bilingual. Oh, and as for the French in Quebec being racist, that is absolutely incorrect. The people of Quebec are both welcome and necessary for Canada's identity, and your remark is the real racist sentiment here.
I live in both worlds (the US and Canada) because I live in Canada and work in the US as an engineer. I can tell you that I let out a great sigh of relief every time I return to Canada at night. Canada is truly safer, quieter, and altogether a 'nicer' place to live. I do, however, find my American acquaintances to be wonderful people, but the American society as a whole is a different matter.
The ideals promoted in the US seem to be the 'big brother types' (i.e. conformity, allegiance, etc.). In Canada, diversity is celebrated, and in the US, it is crushed.
I have even been known to compare the current mentality of the US with that of Nazi Germany. I do not believe that this is being too harsh - when nationality takes precedence over humankind, that is a dangerous situation. I can tell you first hand that most Americans consider themselves to be "leaders of the free world" even though many have never travelled outside of their own country or continent.
If I left Vancouver, it is highly unlikely I'd move to the US. I'd probably make a break for Copenhagen, London, or Hamburg instead.Regarding this statement, and having visited all of these cities (except Vancouver :-) I would have to recommend Hamburg. The beer in Copenhagen is much more expensive, though it is a very fun place too.
Actually, the VIA KT133 chipset for the Duron has had rave reviews.
I just read on the DSF site that "MessengerA2Z is an advanced instant messaging service that comes free to you. Its superior functioning is based on the initial source code made available under GNU GPL license, which brings together the expertise and knowledge of developers world-wide."
They also say that the source will be available shortly. I must say that this is a great publicity thing for DSF because I never would have even known about them until they did this.
Actually, you would assume that to partake in this system, you would have to either contribute drive space, or pay for access. Therefore, your "ocean" space is limited by your contribution.
You know I'm right...
We're forgetting the most important aspect of school here - riding the school bus!
I hate to side with the company that patented one click shopping, but in this case I think that they are the ones being bullied.
When you buy a book, you get one copy, and that copy, unlike the agreements for most software, is yours to own and sell. What Amazon wants to do is get in on a very lucrative business of hooking up buyers and sellers of used books, so they can charge a royalty, probably. This is something that's been going on online for a long time now. There are many campus bulletin boards that went online with used textbooks, for instance.
However, this is not about whether Amazon has the right to sell used books (they do have the right) but it's about the publishers trying to pressure Amazon into only selling new books. In this way, the publishers have banded together to create a kind of monopoly, and are now using that monopoly unfairly against the used book industry.
Peter Principle
Why does everyone keep insisting that BetaMax was such a great technology? Just because it delivers better quality pictures doesn't mean it was better suited for the home user. One of the reasons that VHS succeeded over BetaMax was that you could be sure of recording a whole football game on a VHS tape, but you couldn't fit the whole thing on a BetaMax (depending on game length, of course).
Say you had to commute 40 km to work every day, so you go shopping for a car. There's an electric one with lots of cool gadgets, it's better for the environment, and you're even sure that you could tap into your neighbour's electric panel to fuel up on his electricity! Wow! Except that its average range is, perhaps 75 km, so you would consistently have to walk the last 5km home, start unreeling your 5 km long extension cord, go back to the car, plug it in... or move your house 5 km closer to your work.
Sometimes certain features outweigh all the others, and that was probably partly the case in BetaMax.
The biggest problem is going to be the language.
I highly disagree. The biggest problem for an American would be finding out that there's people living outside of the US!!
Actually, one way that normal *hip* places make money is to sell merchandise. People love to wear the logos of their favorite sneaker company, and are willing to pay lots of money for it.
You see, the US is very quick to get 'pissed' whenever another country in the world doesn't do what is asked. Well, no offence to my good US buddies, but the US government can go to h*ll! 8P
How about JDS Uniphse? They're into some pretty cool optical switches.