According to a recent (a few days ago) survey, global IT job demand in Italy for the entire year 2000 was 115.000 units, while internal supply (i.e., universities) only offered 37.000. Things will get worse in the next two years (i.e., even more scarcity of qualified people), ending with a request of 172.000 units vs an offer of 53.000 in 2002.
I am not sure about the salaries, but they are quite high wrt the cost of living. Just to give an idea, a 0-experience dude with a computer science or computer engineering diploma can easily earn twice or thrice the mean salary - for a start.
You should really check how your earnings would be taxed, though...
Nice essay. Sad essay. My 3000 is still working today, but I don't have a use for it anymore. Still, I have yet to see such an elegantly-designed OS around. And yes, I duly studied the APIs from BeOS, Win32, Linux, MacOS, and some even weirder stuff. But how can you trust an OS that doesn't SetFunction()?:-)
Thanks Leo for unnumbered happy days, back when the world was a nicer place...
Also known as "the BIOS scribbles all over memory when you boot"; you know, that "memory test" the BIOS performs?
Memory tests don't need to be destructive. Simply get the old value, test that a certain location can be written and read back, and put back the old value.
AmigaOS did perform a complete memory check, but it was non-destructive (actually, it had checksums on the most important on-memory structures so it could detect tampering or stomped-over memory).
It's a pity good concepts that save time and money for the user never catch on. Bad concepts that save time and money to the big guys, obviously, are often forced down your throat without compliments.
Just figure, the government had a "war room" in permanent seating at some Secret Service site in Rome. They were all smiling on TV just hours before the millennium. They were still smiling minutes before the millennium. They still smiled after the millennium, but the wine stockpile was seriously compromised. In the afternoon of 1/1/0, the secret service kicked them out because "they were not doing anything useful in any case".
The emergency committee moved at the Trade Department after not having received a single emergency call. AFAIK, everything worked perfectly ok all over the country.
P.S.: the media reported some minor glitch, i.e. newborns on 1/1/0 had an age of "100" reported on some hospital's terminals, but that was all:-)
That argument's a loser--it's going to be danged hard to show that the reverse engineering had anything whatsoever to do with making the Xing player interoperate with Linux.
Still, having a single legitimate use for the reverse-engineered player is enough to make it legal. BTW, this is more or less EFF's position on the issue.
It seems this time european legislators have been smarter than their US counterparts.
Directive 91/250/EEC approved May 14, 1991 contains explicit provisions (look for "Decompilation 1", the document isn't formatted nicely) stating that reverse engineering is absolutely legal when done:
by someone holding the right to use or licensed to use a software product, and
as long as reverse engineering is needed to ensure interoperability with other systems or software (even if developed in-house).
So, it seems that reverse engineering that XING player in order to ensure interoperability with Linux was perfectly legal (in EU), and all the obscurity called for by DVD CCA was just a means to make it difficult for anyone to exercise this right.
As for all European Directives, 91/250 had to be accepted by the various national parliaments before becoming effective. The Italian variant of the directive, D.Lgs. 29/12/92 n. 518, is quite explicit on this respect (see Art. 5, modifications to Art. 64-quater -- in Italian!); I don't know about Norway, though.
Moreover, any contractual clause seeking to limit the rights to "observe, study, and test the software in order to understand its working principles" are deemed void by the law, so even calling that the original license agreement prohibited reverse engineering should not be a valid defense line. This, obviously, holds for Europe. I doubt an US court has any jurisdiction on the people writing DeCSS...
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I am not sure about the salaries, but they are quite high wrt the cost of living. Just to give an idea, a 0-experience dude with a computer science or computer engineering diploma can easily earn twice or thrice the mean salary - for a start.
You should really check how your earnings would be taxed, though...
Thanks Leo for unnumbered happy days, back when the world was a nicer place...
Memory tests don't need to be destructive. Simply get the old value, test that a certain location can be written and read back, and put back the old value.
AmigaOS did perform a complete memory check, but it was non-destructive (actually, it had checksums on the most important on-memory structures so it could detect tampering or stomped-over memory).
It's a pity good concepts that save time and money for the user never catch on. Bad concepts that save time and money to the big guys, obviously, are often forced down your throat without compliments.
Just figure, the government had a "war room" in permanent seating at some Secret Service site in Rome. They were all smiling on TV just hours before the millennium. They were still smiling minutes before the millennium. They still smiled after the millennium, but the wine stockpile was seriously compromised. In the afternoon of 1/1/0, the secret service kicked them out because "they were not doing anything useful in any case".
The emergency committee moved at the Trade Department after not having received a single emergency call. AFAIK, everything worked perfectly ok all over the country.
P.S.: the media reported some minor glitch, i.e. newborns on 1/1/0 had an age of "100" reported on some hospital's terminals, but that was all :-)
Still, having a single legitimate use for the reverse-engineered player is enough to make it legal. BTW, this is more or less EFF's position on the issue.
Directive 91/250/EEC approved May 14, 1991 contains explicit provisions (look for "Decompilation 1", the document isn't formatted nicely) stating that reverse engineering is absolutely legal when done:
So, it seems that reverse engineering that XING player in order to ensure interoperability with Linux was perfectly legal (in EU), and all the obscurity called for by DVD CCA was just a means to make it difficult for anyone to exercise this right.
As for all European Directives, 91/250 had to be accepted by the various national parliaments before becoming effective. The Italian variant of the directive, D.Lgs. 29/12/92 n. 518, is quite explicit on this respect (see Art. 5, modifications to Art. 64-quater -- in Italian!); I don't know about Norway, though.
Moreover, any contractual clause seeking to limit the rights to "observe, study, and test the software in order to understand its working principles" are deemed void by the law, so even calling that the original license agreement prohibited reverse engineering should not be a valid defense line. This, obviously, holds for Europe. I doubt an US court has any jurisdiction on the people writing DeCSS...