I was actually involved in the smart card industry about 4 years ago and (at the time) Java cards where only used in low volumne applications simply because they where the most expensive ones (about dollars a piece, while the most commonly used ones cost cents a piece).
At the time, i was also involved with issuance of credit cards as part of the rollout of credit cards with embedded smartcards following the EMV specification (set up by Europay, Visa and Mastercard) and the biggest credit card issuers, even though the specification allows it, where not planing on using Java based smart cards - they typically issue millions of cars and thus price per-unit is very important.
As far as i know, most credit card issuers have not rolled-out credit cards with Java smartcard technology.
A not so widelly known fact is that many of the most common types of smart card (forgot the names, sorry) actually support multiple applications (with the possibility of loading new applications into the card after issuance). I wouldn't be surprised if, because of their multi-app support and ability to load new apps in-the-field, those cards are confused with Java cards.
I'm sure it will all be about games that cause unbearable pain - they'll probably unveil a new gamming peripheral which a person can attach to their genitalia and which gives a strong electric shock everytime you loose a life ("Jackass the gaming enhancer"?).
I would argue that examining this software is counter productive, and not a good use of resources.
The fact that it is closed and "secret" is offensive enough on its own to protest for change. If democratic election is not the most obvious case for open source (and open hardware), then nothing is.
Agreed - this is very much a case of a social problem, not a technical problem.
Either the source code should be open sourced or the source code should be checked by and independent, technical-savy third party.
Throwing enormous amounts of manhours into first understanding how the hardware works (yes, you first have to read the docs on the hardware just to figure out the CPU used, not to mention the peripherals - and i even haven't checked if enough info is available on things such as where in the I/O addressing space is each peripheral) and then disassembling and understanding low level assembly code of one specific version of the program (and of the hardware itself) is an enormous waste of time.
Even if somebody does find out something fishy, the manufacturer can always claim it was a bug and they fixed it already in a newer version. What would you do then, get some slashdoters spending a lot of time again examining the new version????
Still, this being/. there probably is some nutter^W^W^W^W^W^Wperson out there with a knowledge of embedded systems and assembly, an irrisitible urge to tackle impossible challenges and enough time on his/her hands to do it - just don't expect any sort of timelly response or good documentation;)
Nowadays Java is mostly used in systems and applications for companies, not for home users.
Thus, most Java applications out there have a server component using the J2EE (Java 2 Enterprised Edition) framework and running under an application server such as JBoss, BEA Weblogic or IBM Websphere (to name just the bigguest) and a client component, typically (but not necessarilly) a web-based user interface.
The J2EE framework defines which and how "enterprise" functionalities (HTTP call handling, asynchronous messaging, database access, transactions, distributed functionality, discover and communication with remotedly hosted application components, HTML templating, etc) are provided by the application server to the application itself. J2EE is roughly split in 2 parts, one dealing with dynamic web-based user interfaces (as in, the server component of it) and one for (optionally remotelly accessible) business components and their supporting backend functionality (such as database access, messaging, transactions, etc).
Java with J2EE occupies the same enterprise niche as C# + ASP with.NET.
It's quite likelly that you've already been exposed to Java with J2EE servers via web-sites on the Internet (URLs with script names ending in.jsp,.do and.action are quite likelly on a J2EE application server or at the very least a J2EE web application server (which just implements application server functionality for web-based user interfaces), and even more likelly if you've worked inside big companies (such as banks) since a lot of this stuff is used for intranet web-based user interfaces which need to be reliable, are used by many users simultaneously and are connected to one or more core systems within the company.
There's also a lot of backend systems out there in Java/J2EE doing things like gathering and consolidating data from multiple systems, both internal and external.
The reason why many of us (which work in this area) would like to see more Java under Linux is because currently a lot of the J2EE application servers out there are running on top of Windows (*gasp*), even though all the mainstream J2EE application servers support multiple flavours of Unix (including Linux).
Maybe in some places like California or parts of Europe this will take off, but I don't see it becoming commonplace for industrialized or developing cities.
In Europe we've already addressed the problem of polution in cities with strict rules on cars and fuel. My experience from living in and visiting several major cities in Europe is that it works.
I belive in California they are doing the same!??
Maybe addressing the causes of polution is a beter path than trying to cleanup afterwards (the whole "it's beter to prevent than to remedy" credo)
Having worked in IT in the Netherlands for several years (i just moved to England) i think the bigguest reasons why IT is one of the best sectors to be in Holland are: - The vast majority of companies doing IT will not try to overwork people. - It pays well compared to average salaries. - The market is hot at the moment (especially for experienced people).
BTW: If you work as a contractor in Holland you can get a before taxes income as high as a permanent employee in the US. Unfortunatly, taxes will wipe out about half of that income.
There are people who would give their lives for the ability to do what you shrug off so easily.
- There are people which have given their lifes for the cause of jihad against the western imperialists. - There are people which have given their lifes to allow their country to keep a colony for longer. - There are people which have given their lifes to defeat a militia and allow a genocide to occur. Yet around here we don't go around criticizing people for missing opportunities to hurt westerners or to make money from exploiting the natives/resources of some colony or to kill several people of another etnicity. (though i'm sure that there are sites for all 3 causes where the "sacrifices of the dead" argument is used in defense of "the cause")
I'm not saying that voting is not important, i'm just saying that bringing up the point that people died for a specific cause is a bad argument.
If somebody gets himself killed for a cause even if thinking it's a just cause (as it surelly happened in any of the 3 examples above), that's because they choose to risk their lifes for that cause. Those which live now should make their own choices out of their own beliefs - not follow somebodies argument about how the past choices of dead people (calling it "sacrifices") should dictate the choices of the living.
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I would have let this post pass if not for the +5 moderation i see in it and the fact that the argument that "people died for this" is widelly used in convincing people to commit horrible attrocities (usually it goes about on how your ancesters fought and died for some percieved right of your tribe/race/religion/country which is "being threathened" by some "evil others").
I know the parent post is not inciting death and destruction, but his use of this line of argumentation as an openner for berating others for not doing what he thnks they should do pretty much turns my stomach. (sorry about that)
To be more precise a great many votes are cast by people which, out of an emotional bond akin to clubism or fanboy-ism, always vote for the same party.
This is the kind of people which staunchly defend their "club", but which, beyond the usual slogans and a couple of examples of their "club" doing good, lack a strong, well structured, consistent logical fundation for why their "club" is so much beter than all others.
In my view, these people are the bane of any informed democracy.
The way many Slashdoters position themselfs in this matter comes from the fact that at the moment, in the IP arena, the Laws of the land are very far from the Ethics of the people.
Copyright infringement is against the law. No doubt about it.
The big question is: Is it ethical to copy something without paying the owners of the IP?
Hence the way the discussions around go - the vast majority of the discussions are not about "Is piracy against the law?" but instead they are about "Is piracy wrong given the way IP rights are given nowadays?"
In this context, the always returning posts condemning the use of the word "theft" when refering to "copyright infringement" are there because ethically and morally, there's a world of difference between "taking something away from somebody else" and "making a copy of something which is owned by somebody else" and because those which say that piracy is "theft" are trying to muddle the waters of the ethical discussion by trying to create in people's minds an association between "copiright infrigement" and "taking something away from somebody else" when in fact, it's actually "making a copy of something which is owned by somebody else".
It's only natural that those which believe that the Law does not reflect anymore the wishes of the people (or in other words, what people think is "right") will ignore or even fight the Law. Around here, that takes the shape of discussions about why IP piracy is not wrong altough it's against the law.
1) Galileo invented the thermometer in 1593. I don't trust any temperature data for dates prior to 1593.
There are other ways of getting a good approximation for the average temperature in an area before that date.
For starters, the fact that the area where France now is had glaciers at some point in history is a dead giveway that it was colder then...
More in general, since in ice cores it is actually possible to distinguish the summer ice from the winter ice (and count years), it's actually possible to extrapolate temperature from things like the tickness of the ice accumulate in a year.
Granted, before 1593 the exact value for the temperature in Venice whenever somebody felt like measuring it and registering it for posteriority is not quite as realiable as afterwards - and we all know how much Venice's temperature taken at random moments is a good indicator of average global temperature.
2) Isn't global warming better than another ice age?
Let me rephrase your question: "Isn't global warming beter that being shot in the head?"
Maybe, but then again nobody is trying to shoot me in the head.
As for addressing the part of your question that refers to events that are actually likelly to happen in our and our children's lifetimes:
If the ice on top of Greenland melted, the Earth's oceans would rise 6 to 7 meters (enough to flood London and New York). I suppose that for those that already live on top of a mountain that shouldn't be too much of a problem (though loosing the low lying farmland and the vagues of refuges might be a problem, even for those in the mountains).
3) You know Al Gore's movie, where they show the glacier photos, before and after? Are the before and after both from the same season? Because the glaciers change size seasonally. Did Al Gore show winter 1980 vs. summer 2005?
Are you asking that because one of the pictures had sun and the other a thick cloud cover, or are you just making a wild accusation in the hope that it sticks?
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Just out of curiosity, which PR agency do you work for? Your spin-style arguments (using things like misdirection, attacking a straw man and information control) kinda make me think you might be a pro.
The ability to delay gratification (i.e. don't do it now because it will be easier or the reward will be bigger later) is one of those personal traits which highly correlates with success. It's also one of those things people are supposed to learn when they're kids.
I reckon that anybody wanting to study those which never learned this valuable ability just has to go check the lines on launch day.
Actually it's 3 axes (X, Y, Z) and 3 angles (Roll, Pitch, Yaw)
The first 3 indicate position in 3D space while the other 3 indicate orientation (eg, the direction you're facing).
However, the vast majority of 3D games don't allow the user to directly specify a position in the X,Y,Z axis, instead you specify the orientation of the character (Roll, Pitch, Yaw) and speed so that, after some time, the character will have moved (walked, flyed, swimmed, driven) to the desired (X,Y,Z) position.
The few games where the user specifies a position in X,Y,Z are strategy games, and in practice you actually only use a 2D (X,Y) plane (eg, click in a map to place your troops at that position) plus using a mouse is the most handy.
I vote that all US companies move out of any countries that hold prisioners for an indefinite period without a right to a fair trial, practice torture and/or bug their citizens phones without court orders.... oh wait...
Working for a prestigious company seems very cool and makes you feel important when you're an inexperienced and immature young adult on your first or second job.
After many years of work you have so much professional experience that job placement agents trip over each other trying to get you for one of their vacancies and you know enough and saw enough to figure out that software development in many of those "prestigious" companies is done in an incredibly amateurish way (they got where they got out of sheer luck or because some of the top level managers are slightly less strategically-challenged than others in the industry, not because of their lame-ass project managers or their chaotic software development process). At this point of your career when you've stopped being just another interchangeable little wheel, you've learned your lessons and lost your illusions, working for a "prestigiously" named company seems a lot less important than location, salary, secondary beneficts and reasonable working hours.
If you really want to atract competent senior people you beter be prepared to treat them as adults which will use logic in weighting the pros and cons of working in your company instead of relying on brand appeal which, when it comes to important decisions, really only works with teenagers and people just out of their teens.
Actually as a side note, my personal path to "getting to the next level" as a software developer was (and still is) to try and work as efficiently as possible under the environment you describe.
This has not only vastly improved my coding abilities (especially when i started also coding for maintenability) but, as i became aware of more and more factors that influenced my efficiency in doing my work (and tried to influence those too), has pushed me into learning software design (which i now also do at a senior level)), software architecture, technical analysis, team leadership and even requirements gathering.
Nowadays i do software design and development and also, when i get the chance (read: when it's needed and nobody else knows how to do it properly) i do some technical architecture, analysis, team leadership and requirements gathering.
Maybe it's a little further into the next level than what the OP means, but i suspect the technique holds value even for those that won't want to do anything but coding - just remember to try and figure out the software development process and not just coding, 'cause this will bring into focus things like the importance of coding for maintenability (as in, it will often save your ass).
If you stick to living inside one of the bigguest cities, then public transportation is not that expensive - in truth, it's the trains that i find expensive. Similarly, traffic is not such a huge headache inside the cities ('cause people living inside the cities mostly use their bikes). The traffic problems are concentrated in the highways (and byways) to and from the cities (i should know, i've faced more than my fair share of traffic jams around here). [Maybe there's some relation between the trains issue and the traffic to and from cities???]
Amsterdam is a great place but is quite an atypical dutch city - in my experience from living and working in several places in Holland, Amsterdam is not only the most turistic of cities (as measured by the number of foreign turists one see walking around, especialy in the Dam and in the Red Light Distric), but also seems to be the one with the greater percentage of foreigners living there. I suspect this is both the cause and the consequence of the Amsterdam "vibe".
Having only lived in Amsterdam for the first six months i lived in Holland, and then having moved to a close-by smaller town (Hilversum), and judging from the sea of cars each day stuck in traffic jams at rush hour on the way to and from Amsterdam, my experience probably reflects the typical experience of the dutch themselfs and of those immigrants that moved here for reasons other than the Amsterdam nightlife (no criticist on those that came for the Amsterdan vibe here).
Maybe i made a mistake all those years ago when i moved out of Amsterdam to save on the rent i was paying...
It's a good thing that you're learning the dutch language - i know one or two foreigners *cough* english *cough* which have been living here for many years and hardly speak any dutch. In my experience dutch is a very hard to learn language, but when you do it opens a couple of new doors, especially on the job market (where, at least in IT, about 2/3 of the positions are either for dutch speaking people or consider the ability to speak dutch very important). Besides, dutch is a fun and unusual language to know and only about 15 million people speak it;)
Just as i know several expacts that eventually moved out of Holland, i also know several that made their lifes here (married here, got kids a house and a mortgage). In the end it all boils down to one's answer to the question "Are you enjoying it?".
1. VAT in The Netherlands has been 19% instead of 17.5% for years.
I knew it was in the high-teens but wasn't sure of the value. Since i have no receipt lying around (which usually have the VAT rate) i looked via google and used the first value that looked familiar.
2. The 52% bracket starts at EUR 52.229, where did you get your 33k figure from? (btw, the exchange rate is a lot lower than 1.50!). If we do some calculations, we find out that the effective (box 1) income tax for a EUR 100k income is about 45.3%.
I mistakenly used the GBP (pounds) value for the start of the top-most tax bracket (40%) in the UK.
In a similar vein i used the EUR-GBP exchange rate (which is roughly 1 pound per 1.5 euros).
My guess is that you haven't gotten proper tax advice. It's not impossible to lower the effective rate to about 35-40% max if you know how to navigate the rules and business forms.
It's possible to set-up my own company around here, and if i obbey a number of conditions i can declare my taxes via it. In this situation i can discount many expenses as company expenses. Unfortunately, my expenses beyond food, clothing and rent (all non-deductable) are a very small part (maybe 15%) of my after taxes income - most of the money i earn i save. Thus the company trick would add some requirements and limitation to the way i work, introduce a number of issues and save me very little.
Beyond this, the only big tax break for income tax is house morgage. Given the current status of the housing market in Holland at the moment (highly inflated, stagnating) i have refrained from buying a house.
Hence, i'm paying 55% income tax.
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As far as i can tell, being single, childless, working as a freelancer and renting a house is pretty much the worse possible tax situation for a person here in Holland.
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Anyways, all this does not detract from the fact that for specialized professionals (earning 3 times or more the average salary), Holland is a high-tax country with little in the way of public services.
Until either taxes go down or more public services are available (ie, the liberalization of the last years is partially reversed), anybody living in Holland which is not on the doe (Holland being a place where its very easy to get a disability pension for the smallest of things) will continue to pay high prices for sub-standard public services.
From what i've been seeing, i'm only one of many highly-mobile, highly-paid specialists that is choosing with his feet and leaving the country. In the same way, most of the expats i personally know that recently moved to Holland have moved back or are thinking of moving back.
If this is a trend (and not just anedoctal evidence), it would go part of the way in explain the current lack of IT specialist of my area in Holland (which i can easilly gauge by the ammount of proposals in my e-mail box even though i'm listed in most job sites as not available).
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The bottom line is that i cannot in good conscience sugest Holland as a good country to move to for anybody but those who value personal freedom above all.
I'm a portuguese living in Holland for the last 7 years.
As i progressed in my career and my salary went up i payed an increasing proportion of it as income tax. At this moment i work as a freelancer in IT and i make more than twice as much monthly (after taxes) as i did when i started working here.
At the moment, and due to the freaky way freelancers are taxed (i'm paying both employer's and employee's taxes and mandatory costs) the total ammount of tax levied on my base rate (the ammount that is payed for my services) is around 55%. In other words, for every 8 hours i work a day, about 4h20m of those i'm working to pay the belastingdienst (tax office).
In two days time i will move to England.
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So, what are the good and the bad things about Holland (from the point of view of an european):
Good:
Freedom. Freedom to be and do whatever you want. There are few "moral" laws (i.e. laws prohibiting non-mainstream private acts) in Holland and most dutch people follow the principle of "You can do whatever you want as long as i don't have to see it and you don't harm anybody". Thus pot consumption is tolerated, prostitution is lawfull and regulated, non-heterosexuals are not descriminated against and more. Although the current government (conservatives) has pushed a bit on prostitution and pot, they're about to be thrown out
Rational work hours. People around here usually work 8h/day period. Even in IT very, very few companies will try to get you to work more than that, and if you push back on those they will give up on it. The interesting fact is that, in IT and by comparisson with sistematically working 10h/day (which i did in another country), working 8h/day is actually more productive (as in, the projects are actually done in fewer days if people work 8h/day). Also a lot of people around here work part-time (not all days of the week and/or less than 8h day).
Tax break for foreigners (the 30% rule). There is a tax break for foreigners coming to Holland to fill in a position that requires expertises for which it is difficult to find someone from the local worker pool. This roughly ammounts to having 30% of the income being ignored for tax purposes. The tax discount lasts for up to 10 years and can be lost if you're without work for more than 3 months (i lost mine this way when i was unemployed for 5 months during the recession). The evaluation of suitability for the tax discount is subjective but in practice, when there is a lack of people specialized in a specific area, most applicants for jobs in that area get the tax break. At the moment there is a great lack of people in IT around here
No tolls on highways. All highways in Holland are free
Not so good:
Taxes around here are high. The top income tax rate around here is 52% and is levied on the any yearly income above (roughly) 33000 EUR (about $50000). VAT is 17,5% on most things except things like essencials (such as food) and books. Having a car around here is a constant drain in your pocket due to road taxes and expensive insurance.
Public services are not public at all. Around here you pay for many so-called public services. Thus, for example, public transportation is expensive, people have to pay for any health services they use (since 2006 every resident in Holland is mandated by law to have at least the basic health insurance) and contributions to private pension funds are mandatory for most people.
At the moment, Holland has Swedish style taxes (high taxes) and US style public services (almost none and you pay for everything). In my opinion this is the thing that make Holland a very unactractive country to move to at the moment - during the last 10 or so years the successive dutch governments have been busy tearing down public services while keeping taxes at their original (high) level. Currently people around here are taxed as if they had lots of free public services AND have almost no free public services.
A carebear in a MMORPG is someone which would rather not spend several hours doing a repetitive task in order to get some random rare drop.
In my experience, carebears are usually people that don't have that much time available for playing games and which often in their real lifes have to "spend several hours doing a repetitive task" (for example, adults with jobs) so they're hardly keen on going online only to do some other repetitive tasks.
Ironically, it's been my experiance that those people who have used this term to insult things, act more childish than the actions or people it's being used upon.
In my experience, those that accuse others of being carebears are those which have plenty of free time and have no problem with doing the same thing over and over again to get some random rare drop. Typically these are NOT adults with jobs, and given the demographics of the online gaming comunity (there are not that many retired folks playing online) are mostly teenagers and kids.
It's thus hardly surprising that those accusing others of being carebears act childish in comparisson with the carbears, since those making the accusation tend to be immature teens and kids while those being accused tend to be adults.
PS (offtopic): Personally the thing that mostly turns me off of MMORPGs (and i've played quite a number over the years, including WoW) is having to deal with kids and immature teens hidding behind the anonymity of an online avatar. There are a couple of problems i see in mixing adults and non-adults in an online RPGs:
Most acts of online vandalism and harassment that i have seen (and, more rarelly, been the victim of) were commited by people that were clearly kids or teens (judging from their language). Even when it comes to normal communication, kids and teens are the most prone to loose their temper or resort to gratuitous insults or bad language. More in general, kids and teens are given to all sorts of posturing behaviours (in which, due to their own lack of self-confidence, they try to assert themselfs by acting in ways they believe are bold) that are unpleasant to others
The ideal MMORPG for those with plenty of free time in their hands is different than the one for those with little free time and a day job. Game publishers keep trying to lean both ways, often leaving both groups dissatisfied.
Teens and kids (especially kids) tend to be inexperienced and simple minded in the ways of tactics and strategy. They also tend to lack self-control and discipline. Whenever doing PvP or PvE with a PUG (Pick Up Group - more or less random group of players which are not used to playing with each other), very often the group fails due to one or two people that can't work well with the group. Although i personally use this to my advantage in online FPSs (i have fast reflexes for a "grown-up" plus i'm beter at placing myself in the game so i'm often in the top 3 even though the game is full of teens with faster reflexes), when working with a group in an online RPG this can be very frustrating
Personally i would love that MMORPGs had the option to join adults-only servers (just call it "casual gamer server" otherwise every teenager will try to get in).
In an pay-per-month online RPG the decision to postpone an expansion pack isn't quite that hard to take as it would in a no-monthly-fee game - waiting for the expansion pack might actually keep around (and paying) several players that saw it all and did it all and were getting bored with the game.
It's not quite the "we'll delay getting some revenue from the game and risk our company so that the game comes out perfect for players" kind of attitude that it would be for other companies.
PS: Gothic 3 is hardly the only bug filled, "keep on patching until hell freezes over" kind of game that EA has put out. In my experience the vast majory of games published by EA come out as bug-filled betas. After my experience with BF2 (where many patches actually made the game crash more often), i completly stopped buying EA games (i'm waiting for Quake Wars for my fill of online FPS mayhem).
Oh give us a break, and get off your nationalistic high-horse.
This is the kind of attitude that pisses me off.
As i said above, i'm an habituee here and i wasn't surprised or even shocked that the top of the thread was US-centric. It's normal around here because so many slashdoters are americans. If i was frequenting a french-speaking site based in France, i would expect a french-centric view of things. I myself am not faultless, since i tend to have an european-centric view of things (i've move from my native land to another european country, hence i don't have a one-nation-centric view on things).
However, once pointed out the X-centrism of the discussion, i expect people to admit to it and (in this specific case) accept that other views should also be considered (maybe it's my euro-centric view of things, around here thats how most college educated people would react).
Instead the parent poster basically respondend with "Fuck off. We're the important ones. Get out of here!" and got modded all the way to +4 for it (which tells me that at least 2 other persons agreed with what he posted and the way he worded it)
To summon things up, i wasn't making a cause celebre out of americans having an american-centric view on things, i was reacting to one of those (the parent poster) that have a high-handed, "Who cares about anybody else?" and "America is more important and if you don't like it piss off" attittude.
I happen to think that a similar attittude by the current US administration has turned public opinion around the world against the US which is something that at the moment isn't exactly contributing to world peace and improved security against nutcases (be they nuke-developing regimes or islamic terrorists).
Oh give us a break, and get off your nationalistic high-horse.
Wikipedia and Slashdot originated in and are owned and run by people in the United States. Sure the Internet is a worldwide thing, but don't gripe if a majority of people on those sites appear to be American. If it's that big of a deal, go find different sites that better suit your needs.
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, one of the 20 most visited websites.
As for Slashdot, it's owned by OSTG which in turn is fully owned by VA Software which is quoted in NASDAQ so it might have a majority of US stockholders but then again, given how much foreign investment has gone into US stocks, it might not.
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Now, i happen to agree with the grandparent post that the requests above in the thread are US-centric but, being an habituee here in/. i'm not exactly surprised (or overly shocked).
Still, i certainly hope that they use the $100M for the good of the whole of mankind and not just a specific small portion of it residing in one country (and which contanis an unusual number of individuals that think themselfs superior to all others).
As for your post:
Accusing of being in a high horse the guy that sugested that the wikipedia should also preserve things that are important to the other 6,226,726,049 people instead of just the stuff important for the 298,444,215 americans is ridiculous, a little sad and shows the side of many Americans which is most despised by the vast majority of those 6,226,726,049 non-US-citizen people - the outspoken belief that you're inherently superior, more worthy and more important than everybody else.
No wonder that public opinion in Europe (were i live) is the most anti-American it ever was....
I'm in Europe an my mobile phone at the moment is a RAZR which i bought standalone (i.e. not bundled with a carrier's subscription). I can connect the phone to my PC with either a USB cable that came with the phone or via bluetooth.
The previous one was a Sony-Ericsson which i could also easilly connect to a PC via bluetooth.
The one before that (Nokia) i could connect via IR (since my PC didn't had any infrared adaptor i had to go via my Palm Pilot's IR adaptor and then the cradle)
Methinks your problem is caused by the way american carriers purposelly cripple bundled mobile phones.....
Actually i think i didn't explain things correctly, so i'll try to clarify:
The JS language itself doesn't depend on the server. The dependency (an thus the coupling) comes when going the AJAX way where JS code on the browser side asynchronously (either triggered by some user action or by a timer) makes a (asynchronous) HTTP connections to the server and asks for pieces data which it (the JS code) then uses to update the information shown on the browser. The dependency here is that, to serve each possible request for data from the JS code, there must be a server-side handler (for lack of a beter word) that actually knows how to execute that operation (by, for example, parsing the request parameters coming from the JS via the HTTP Request, then doing a query on a database with those parameters and finally encoding the results in a format that the JS will understand and returning them). Not only that, but the formats that the server uses recieve a request and to return the information requested by the JS must match the formats that are programmed in the JS - thus for example, if during development it is discovered that for a specific query, an extra field of data must be returned, the format has to be changed to support the extra field and both the server side code and the JS code have to be changed to work with it.
Thus the dependency is not a property of the language itself, it's a property of the AJAX way of doing things (ie, having many snippets of JS code executing many HTTP requests, each tailored to the needs of that specific snippet of JS code) which requires having server-side code (usually custom made) that can understand and execute all the possible requests that the JS code can send to the server.
Slashdot Mirror
I was actually involved in the smart card industry about 4 years ago and (at the time) Java cards where only used in low volumne applications simply because they where the most expensive ones (about dollars a piece, while the most commonly used ones cost cents a piece).
At the time, i was also involved with issuance of credit cards as part of the rollout of credit cards with embedded smartcards following the EMV specification (set up by Europay, Visa and Mastercard) and the biggest credit card issuers, even though the specification allows it, where not planing on using Java based smart cards - they typically issue millions of cars and thus price per-unit is very important.
As far as i know, most credit card issuers have not rolled-out credit cards with Java smartcard technology.
A not so widelly known fact is that many of the most common types of smart card (forgot the names, sorry) actually support multiple applications (with the possibility of loading new applications into the card after issuance). I wouldn't be surprised if, because of their multi-app support and ability to load new apps in-the-field, those cards are confused with Java cards.
I'm sure it will all be about games that cause unbearable pain - they'll probably unveil a new gamming peripheral which a person can attach to their genitalia and which gives a strong electric shock everytime you loose a life ("Jackass the gaming enhancer"?).
Agreed - this is very much a case of a social problem, not a technical problem.
Either the source code should be open sourced or the source code should be checked by and independent, technical-savy third party.
Throwing enormous amounts of manhours into first understanding how the hardware works (yes, you first have to read the docs on the hardware just to figure out the CPU used, not to mention the peripherals - and i even haven't checked if enough info is available on things such as where in the I/O addressing space is each peripheral) and then disassembling and understanding low level assembly code of one specific version of the program (and of the hardware itself) is an enormous waste of time.
Even if somebody does find out something fishy, the manufacturer can always claim it was a bug and they fixed it already in a newer version. What would you do then, get some slashdoters spending a lot of time again examining the new version????
Still, this being
Nowadays Java is mostly used in systems and applications for companies, not for home users.
.NET.
.jsp, .do and .action are quite likelly on a J2EE application server or at the very least a J2EE web application server (which just implements application server functionality for web-based user interfaces), and even more likelly if you've worked inside big companies (such as banks) since a lot of this stuff is used for intranet web-based user interfaces which need to be reliable, are used by many users simultaneously and are connected to one or more core systems within the company.
Thus, most Java applications out there have a server component using the J2EE (Java 2 Enterprised Edition) framework and running under an application server such as JBoss, BEA Weblogic or IBM Websphere (to name just the bigguest) and a client component, typically (but not necessarilly) a web-based user interface.
The J2EE framework defines which and how "enterprise" functionalities (HTTP call handling, asynchronous messaging, database access, transactions, distributed functionality, discover and communication with remotedly hosted application components, HTML templating, etc) are provided by the application server to the application itself. J2EE is roughly split in 2 parts, one dealing with dynamic web-based user interfaces (as in, the server component of it) and one for (optionally remotelly accessible) business components and their supporting backend functionality (such as database access, messaging, transactions, etc).
Java with J2EE occupies the same enterprise niche as C# + ASP with
It's quite likelly that you've already been exposed to Java with J2EE servers via web-sites on the Internet (URLs with script names ending in
There's also a lot of backend systems out there in Java/J2EE doing things like gathering and consolidating data from multiple systems, both internal and external.
The reason why many of us (which work in this area) would like to see more Java under Linux is because currently a lot of the J2EE application servers out there are running on top of Windows (*gasp*), even though all the mainstream J2EE application servers support multiple flavours of Unix (including Linux).
In Europe we've already addressed the problem of polution in cities with strict rules on cars and fuel. My experience from living in and visiting several major cities in Europe is that it works.
I belive in California they are doing the same!??
Maybe addressing the causes of polution is a beter path than trying to cleanup afterwards (the whole "it's beter to prevent than to remedy" credo)
Having worked in IT in the Netherlands for several years (i just moved to England) i think the bigguest reasons why IT is one of the best sectors to be in Holland are:
- The vast majority of companies doing IT will not try to overwork people.
- It pays well compared to average salaries.
- The market is hot at the moment (especially for experienced people).
BTW: If you work as a contractor in Holland you can get a before taxes income as high as a permanent employee in the US. Unfortunatly, taxes will wipe out about half of that income.
- There are people which have given their lifes for the cause of jihad against the western imperialists.
- There are people which have given their lifes to allow their country to keep a colony for longer.
- There are people which have given their lifes to defeat a militia and allow a genocide to occur.
Yet around here we don't go around criticizing people for missing opportunities to hurt westerners or to make money from exploiting the natives/resources of some colony or to kill several people of another etnicity.
(though i'm sure that there are sites for all 3 causes where the "sacrifices of the dead" argument is used in defense of "the cause")
I'm not saying that voting is not important, i'm just saying that bringing up the point that people died for a specific cause is a bad argument.
If somebody gets himself killed for a cause even if thinking it's a just cause (as it surelly happened in any of the 3 examples above), that's because they choose to risk their lifes for that cause. Those which live now should make their own choices out of their own beliefs - not follow somebodies argument about how the past choices of dead people (calling it "sacrifices") should dictate the choices of the living.
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I would have let this post pass if not for the +5 moderation i see in it and the fact that the argument that "people died for this" is widelly used in convincing people to commit horrible attrocities (usually it goes about on how your ancesters fought and died for some percieved right of your tribe/race/religion/country which is "being threathened" by some "evil others").
I know the parent post is not inciting death and destruction, but his use of this line of argumentation as an openner for berating others for not doing what he thnks they should do pretty much turns my stomach. (sorry about that)
To be more precise a great many votes are cast by people which, out of an emotional bond akin to clubism or fanboy-ism, always vote for the same party.
This is the kind of people which staunchly defend their "club", but which, beyond the usual slogans and a couple of examples of their "club" doing good, lack a strong, well structured, consistent logical fundation for why their "club" is so much beter than all others.
In my view, these people are the bane of any informed democracy.
Actually, the area of the oceans is 361,254,000 km2, you used the land area from your source :)
Redoing the maths:
The relation between the average depth of the ice in Greenland and the raise in sea level if it melts is:
361,254,000/(1,755,637 * 1.09) = 188.8
Thus for every meter of raise in the sea level the ice in Greenland must be 188.8 meters deep. For 6 meters, that's 1132.8.
Not totally irrealistic.
The way many Slashdoters position themselfs in this matter comes from the fact that at the moment, in the IP arena, the Laws of the land are very far from the Ethics of the people.
Copyright infringement is against the law. No doubt about it.
The big question is: Is it ethical to copy something without paying the owners of the IP?
Hence the way the discussions around go - the vast majority of the discussions are not about "Is piracy against the law?" but instead they are about "Is piracy wrong given the way IP rights are given nowadays?"
In this context, the always returning posts condemning the use of the word "theft" when refering to "copyright infringement" are there because ethically and morally, there's a world of difference between "taking something away from somebody else" and "making a copy of something which is owned by somebody else" and because those which say that piracy is "theft" are trying to muddle the waters of the ethical discussion by trying to create in people's minds an association between "copiright infrigement" and "taking something away from somebody else" when in fact, it's actually "making a copy of something which is owned by somebody else".
It's only natural that those which believe that the Law does not reflect anymore the wishes of the people (or in other words, what people think is "right") will ignore or even fight the Law. Around here, that takes the shape of discussions about why IP piracy is not wrong altough it's against the law.
There are other ways of getting a good approximation for the average temperature in an area before that date.
For starters, the fact that the area where France now is had glaciers at some point in history is a dead giveway that it was colder then
More in general, since in ice cores it is actually possible to distinguish the summer ice from the winter ice (and count years), it's actually possible to extrapolate temperature from things like the tickness of the ice accumulate in a year.
Granted, before 1593 the exact value for the temperature in Venice whenever somebody felt like measuring it and registering it for posteriority is not quite as realiable as afterwards - and we all know how much Venice's temperature taken at random moments is a good indicator of average global temperature.
Let me rephrase your question: "Isn't global warming beter that being shot in the head?"
Maybe, but then again nobody is trying to shoot me in the head.
As for addressing the part of your question that refers to events that are actually likelly to happen in our and our children's lifetimes:
If the ice on top of Greenland melted, the Earth's oceans would rise 6 to 7 meters (enough to flood London and New York). I suppose that for those that already live on top of a mountain that shouldn't be too much of a problem (though loosing the low lying farmland and the vagues of refuges might be a problem, even for those in the mountains).
Are you asking that because one of the pictures had sun and the other a thick cloud cover, or are you just making a wild accusation in the hope that it sticks?
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Just out of curiosity, which PR agency do you work for? Your spin-style arguments (using things like misdirection, attacking a straw man and information control) kinda make me think you might be a pro.
The ability to delay gratification (i.e. don't do it now because it will be easier or the reward will be bigger later) is one of those personal traits which highly correlates with success. It's also one of those things people are supposed to learn when they're kids.
I reckon that anybody wanting to study those which never learned this valuable ability just has to go check the lines on launch day.
Actually it's 3 axes (X, Y, Z) and 3 angles (Roll, Pitch, Yaw)
The first 3 indicate position in 3D space while the other 3 indicate orientation (eg, the direction you're facing).
However, the vast majority of 3D games don't allow the user to directly specify a position in the X,Y,Z axis, instead you specify the orientation of the character (Roll, Pitch, Yaw) and speed so that, after some time, the character will have moved (walked, flyed, swimmed, driven) to the desired (X,Y,Z) position.
The few games where the user specifies a position in X,Y,Z are strategy games, and in practice you actually only use a 2D (X,Y) plane (eg, click in a map to place your troops at that position) plus using a mouse is the most handy.
I vote that all US companies move out of any countries that hold prisioners for an indefinite period without a right to a fair trial, practice torture and/or bug their citizens phones without court orders .... oh wait...
Working for a prestigious company seems very cool and makes you feel important when you're an inexperienced and immature young adult on your first or second job.
After many years of work you have so much professional experience that job placement agents trip over each other trying to get you for one of their vacancies and you know enough and saw enough to figure out that software development in many of those "prestigious" companies is done in an incredibly amateurish way (they got where they got out of sheer luck or because some of the top level managers are slightly less strategically-challenged than others in the industry, not because of their lame-ass project managers or their chaotic software development process). At this point of your career when you've stopped being just another interchangeable little wheel, you've learned your lessons and lost your illusions, working for a "prestigiously" named company seems a lot less important than location, salary, secondary beneficts and reasonable working hours.
If you really want to atract competent senior people you beter be prepared to treat them as adults which will use logic in weighting the pros and cons of working in your company instead of relying on brand appeal which, when it comes to important decisions, really only works with teenagers and people just out of their teens.
Actually as a side note, my personal path to "getting to the next level" as a software developer was (and still is) to try and work as efficiently as possible under the environment you describe.
This has not only vastly improved my coding abilities (especially when i started also coding for maintenability) but, as i became aware of more and more factors that influenced my efficiency in doing my work (and tried to influence those too), has pushed me into learning software design (which i now also do at a senior level)), software architecture, technical analysis, team leadership and even requirements gathering.
Nowadays i do software design and development and also, when i get the chance (read: when it's needed and nobody else knows how to do it properly) i do some technical architecture, analysis, team leadership and requirements gathering.
Maybe it's a little further into the next level than what the OP means, but i suspect the technique holds value even for those that won't want to do anything but coding - just remember to try and figure out the software development process and not just coding, 'cause this will bring into focus things like the importance of coding for maintenability (as in, it will often save your ass).
If you stick to living inside one of the bigguest cities, then public transportation is not that expensive - in truth, it's the trains that i find expensive. Similarly, traffic is not such a huge headache inside the cities ('cause people living inside the cities mostly use their bikes). The traffic problems are concentrated in the highways (and byways) to and from the cities (i should know, i've faced more than my fair share of traffic jams around here).
...
;)
[Maybe there's some relation between the trains issue and the traffic to and from cities???]
Amsterdam is a great place but is quite an atypical dutch city - in my experience from living and working in several places in Holland, Amsterdam is not only the most turistic of cities (as measured by the number of foreign turists one see walking around, especialy in the Dam and in the Red Light Distric), but also seems to be the one with the greater percentage of foreigners living there. I suspect this is both the cause and the consequence of the Amsterdam "vibe".
Having only lived in Amsterdam for the first six months i lived in Holland, and then having moved to a close-by smaller town (Hilversum), and judging from the sea of cars each day stuck in traffic jams at rush hour on the way to and from Amsterdam, my experience probably reflects the typical experience of the dutch themselfs and of those immigrants that moved here for reasons other than the Amsterdam nightlife (no criticist on those that came for the Amsterdan vibe here).
Maybe i made a mistake all those years ago when i moved out of Amsterdam to save on the rent i was paying
It's a good thing that you're learning the dutch language - i know one or two foreigners *cough* english *cough* which have been living here for many years and hardly speak any dutch.
In my experience dutch is a very hard to learn language, but when you do it opens a couple of new doors, especially on the job market (where, at least in IT, about 2/3 of the positions are either for dutch speaking people or consider the ability to speak dutch very important).
Besides, dutch is a fun and unusual language to know and only about 15 million people speak it
Just as i know several expacts that eventually moved out of Holland, i also know several that made their lifes here (married here, got kids a house and a mortgage). In the end it all boils down to one's answer to the question "Are you enjoying it?".
So good luck to you and keep enjoying it!
I knew it was in the high-teens but wasn't sure of the value. Since i have no receipt lying around (which usually have the VAT rate) i looked via google and used the first value that looked familiar.
I mistakenly used the GBP (pounds) value for the start of the top-most tax bracket (40%) in the UK.
In a similar vein i used the EUR-GBP exchange rate (which is roughly 1 pound per 1.5 euros).
It's possible to set-up my own company around here, and if i obbey a number of conditions i can declare my taxes via it. In this situation i can discount many expenses as company expenses. Unfortunately, my expenses beyond food, clothing and rent (all non-deductable) are a very small part (maybe 15%) of my after taxes income - most of the money i earn i save. Thus the company trick would add some requirements and limitation to the way i work, introduce a number of issues and save me very little.
Beyond this, the only big tax break for income tax is house morgage. Given the current status of the housing market in Holland at the moment (highly inflated, stagnating) i have refrained from buying a house.
Hence, i'm paying 55% income tax.
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As far as i can tell, being single, childless, working as a freelancer and renting a house is pretty much the worse possible tax situation for a person here in Holland.
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Anyways, all this does not detract from the fact that for specialized professionals (earning 3 times or more the average salary), Holland is a high-tax country with little in the way of public services.
Until either taxes go down or more public services are available (ie, the liberalization of the last years is partially reversed), anybody living in Holland which is not on the doe (Holland being a place where its very easy to get a disability pension for the smallest of things) will continue to pay high prices for sub-standard public services.
From what i've been seeing, i'm only one of many highly-mobile, highly-paid specialists that is choosing with his feet and leaving the country.
In the same way, most of the expats i personally know that recently moved to Holland have moved back or are thinking of moving back.
If this is a trend (and not just anedoctal evidence), it would go part of the way in explain the current lack of IT specialist of my area in Holland (which i can easilly gauge by the ammount of proposals in my e-mail box even though i'm listed in most job sites as not available).
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The bottom line is that i cannot in good conscience sugest Holland as a good country to move to for anybody but those who value personal freedom above all.
As i progressed in my career and my salary went up i payed an increasing proportion of it as income tax. At this moment i work as a freelancer in IT and i make more than twice as much monthly (after taxes) as i did when i started working here.
At the moment, and due to the freaky way freelancers are taxed (i'm paying both employer's and employee's taxes and mandatory costs) the total ammount of tax levied on my base rate (the ammount that is payed for my services) is around 55%.
In other words, for every 8 hours i work a day, about 4h20m of those i'm working to pay the belastingdienst (tax office).
In two days time i will move to England.
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So, what are the good and the bad things about Holland (from the point of view of an european):
Good:
Not so good:
In my experience, carebears are usually people that don't have that much time available for playing games and which often in their real lifes have to "spend several hours doing a repetitive task" (for example, adults with jobs) so they're hardly keen on going online only to do some other repetitive tasks.
In my experience, those that accuse others of being carebears are those which have plenty of free time and have no problem with doing the same thing over and over again to get some random rare drop. Typically these are NOT adults with jobs, and given the demographics of the online gaming comunity (there are not that many retired folks playing online) are mostly teenagers and kids.
It's thus hardly surprising that those accusing others of being carebears act childish in comparisson with the carbears, since those making the accusation tend to be immature teens and kids while those being accused tend to be adults.
PS (offtopic): Personally the thing that mostly turns me off of MMORPGs (and i've played quite a number over the years, including WoW) is having to deal with kids and immature teens hidding behind the anonymity of an online avatar. There are a couple of problems i see in mixing adults and non-adults in an online RPGs:
Personally i would love that MMORPGs had the option to join adults-only servers (just call it "casual gamer server" otherwise every teenager will try to get in).
In an pay-per-month online RPG the decision to postpone an expansion pack isn't quite that hard to take as it would in a no-monthly-fee game - waiting for the expansion pack might actually keep around (and paying) several players that saw it all and did it all and were getting bored with the game.
It's not quite the "we'll delay getting some revenue from the game and risk our company so that the game comes out perfect for players" kind of attitude that it would be for other companies.
PS: Gothic 3 is hardly the only bug filled, "keep on patching until hell freezes over" kind of game that EA has put out. In my experience the vast majory of games published by EA come out as bug-filled betas. After my experience with BF2 (where many patches actually made the game crash more often), i completly stopped buying EA games (i'm waiting for Quake Wars for my fill of online FPS mayhem).
This is the kind of attitude that pisses me off.
As i said above, i'm an habituee here and i wasn't surprised or even shocked that the top of the thread was US-centric. It's normal around here because so many slashdoters are americans. If i was frequenting a french-speaking site based in France, i would expect a french-centric view of things.
I myself am not faultless, since i tend to have an european-centric view of things (i've move from my native land to another european country, hence i don't have a one-nation-centric view on things).
However, once pointed out the X-centrism of the discussion, i expect people to admit to it and (in this specific case) accept that other views should also be considered (maybe it's my euro-centric view of things, around here thats how most college educated people would react).
Instead the parent poster basically respondend with "Fuck off. We're the important ones. Get out of here!" and got modded all the way to +4 for it (which tells me that at least 2 other persons agreed with what he posted and the way he worded it)
To summon things up, i wasn't making a cause celebre out of americans having an american-centric view on things, i was reacting to one of those (the parent poster) that have a high-handed, "Who cares about anybody else?" and "America is more important and if you don't like it piss off" attittude.
I happen to think that a similar attittude by the current US administration has turned public opinion around the world against the US which is something that at the moment isn't exactly contributing to world peace and improved security against nutcases (be they nuke-developing regimes or islamic terrorists).
Bzzzt - wrong!
From the Wikimedia Foundation site:
As for Slashdot, it's owned by OSTG which in turn is fully owned by VA Software which is quoted in NASDAQ so it might have a majority of US stockholders but then again, given how much foreign investment has gone into US stocks, it might not.
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Now, i happen to agree with the grandparent post that the requests above in the thread are US-centric but, being an habituee here in
Still, i certainly hope that they use the $100M for the good of the whole of mankind and not just a specific small portion of it residing in one country (and which contanis an unusual number of individuals that think themselfs superior to all others).
As for your post:
Accusing of being in a high horse the guy that sugested that the wikipedia should also preserve things that are important to the other 6,226,726,049 people instead of just the stuff important for the 298,444,215 americans is ridiculous, a little sad and shows the side of many Americans which is most despised by the vast majority of those 6,226,726,049 non-US-citizen people - the outspoken belief that you're inherently superior, more worthy and more important than everybody else.
No wonder that public opinion in Europe (were i live) is the most anti-American it ever was
I'm in Europe an my mobile phone at the moment is a RAZR which i bought standalone (i.e. not bundled with a carrier's subscription). I can connect the phone to my PC with either a USB cable that came with the phone or via bluetooth.
.....
The previous one was a Sony-Ericsson which i could also easilly connect to a PC via bluetooth.
The one before that (Nokia) i could connect via IR (since my PC didn't had any infrared adaptor i had to go via my Palm Pilot's IR adaptor and then the cradle)
Methinks your problem is caused by the way american carriers purposelly cripple bundled mobile phones
Actually i think i didn't explain things correctly, so i'll try to clarify:
The JS language itself doesn't depend on the server. The dependency (an thus the coupling) comes when going the AJAX way where JS code on the browser side asynchronously (either triggered by some user action or by a timer) makes a (asynchronous) HTTP connections to the server and asks for pieces data which it (the JS code) then uses to update the information shown on the browser. The dependency here is that, to serve each possible request for data from the JS code, there must be a server-side handler (for lack of a beter word) that actually knows how to execute that operation (by, for example, parsing the request parameters coming from the JS via the HTTP Request, then doing a query on a database with those parameters and finally encoding the results in a format that the JS will understand and returning them). Not only that, but the formats that the server uses recieve a request and to return the information requested by the JS must match the formats that are programmed in the JS - thus for example, if during development it is discovered that for a specific query, an extra field of data must be returned, the format has to be changed to support the extra field and both the server side code and the JS code have to be changed to work with it.
Thus the dependency is not a property of the language itself, it's a property of the AJAX way of doing things (ie, having many snippets of JS code executing many HTTP requests, each tailored to the needs of that specific snippet of JS code) which requires having server-side code (usually custom made) that can understand and execute all the possible requests that the JS code can send to the server.
Hence the whole coupling talk.