The Non-commercial stipulation is really not so restrictive as you think.
Software that can be developed include: 1) Open-source, GPL'ed apps 2) Free apps 3) Apps for internal use in an educational institution or charity 4) DAQ-type apps for fieldwork in a research group 5) Personal productivity tools 6) Testing apps
It's likely that the IDEs are written for.NET like the current Visual Studio is..NET programs are more or less runnable under Mono, but the problem is System.Windows.Forms, which most Windows.NET programs use.
System.Windows.Forms support is incomplete in Mono at the moment.
Violence and sexual behavior are facts of life, true, but that doesn't mean everyone has to condone it. And no, I do not agree that they define us as people. People should be able to choose what kinds of values they want to have without being subject to derision. And that doesn't necessarily have to mean that they're necessarily divorced from reality. They just have different values.
I think we're all sick of holier-than-thou attitudes, but let's not stoop to that level ourselves.
Your post confirms something: smugness isn't limited to fundamentalist Christian groups.
Spymac is slow, difficult to configure, unreliable and generally ugly. Sure, they give you a 1 GB spymac.com email account, WebDAV space, webspace, iCal hosting etc. but the whole setup lacks finesse and elegance. I wouldn't recommend Spymac anyone except the desperate.
Did I mention it was sloooww?
For free iCal hosting, try icalx.com instead. There exists another free iCal hosting service but I forget the name.
I don't know about government agencies, but I know companies that prohibit the use of Word documents because of the sensitivity of the data.
Word documents often contain a lot of meta information and sometimes, even older revisions of stuff, in the file. There was even a story on The Register some time ago about some incriminating information found in some U.S. government.doc files or something.
Granted, you can turn off the meta-info and revisions, but most people don't even know it's there in the first place.
The.pps doesn't mean it's standalone. It just an extension to tell Powerpoint (or the viewer) to play the presentation immediately. The file format is exactly the same as.ppt files.
Try renaming any.ppt file to.pps and double click on it. You'll see what I mean.
I agree, and I've noticed lately that many major sites have been redesigned for scaling e.g. oracle.com. IBM.com still constrains their layout to a fixed resolution though.
I can guess why some people would still want to design fixed-resolution sites. Some of these web-designers probably come from a print background, and as a result of their training, they are stuck with a lot of print-specific notions that are admittedly hard to discard.
I have to concede that designing for a fixed resolution is simply easier in most cases (especially if you use a lot of bitmaps and rely on oldskool 1-px tricks to achieve your layout). Fixed resolutions give you absolute coordinates, which are just more convenient to work with. To some extent, they also help to ensure your layout's robustness across browsers (e.g. a width="30%" doesn't always give you 30% in all browsers) The layout at wolfram.com, for instance, would have been more difficult to achieve using scalable elements.
CSS solves a big part of the problem by giving you a level of control that allows for precision layout, but unfortunately some elements like bitmaps just don't scale (and SVG isn't widespread yet).
The other (albeit inadvertent) benefit of contraining the size of a page to a lowest-common-denominator fixed resolution like 640x480, is that it keeps the text-width small for the majority of people who run at higher resolutions. The advantage of doing this is the same as the advantage of having columns: studies have shown that shorter text-widths make for higher readability.
Having said that, I prefer scalable-resolution websites myself.
At the end of the day, it's about achieving a balance between function and form. And it's really really hard to do, so most people choose one or the other. Props to you if you can do both.
I use Firefox on my XP machine and Safari 1.2.2 on my OS X machine. In my humble opinion, Firefox isn't tHAT similar to Safari.... any resemblance is at best superficial, i.e. the baseline behavior you'd expect from any browser (except IE).
I have to say that my user experience on Firefox Win is definitely more positive than Firefox on OS X... the Windows version is just snappier and more polished than its Mac counterpart.
Safari on the other hand, lacks some useful features that Firefox has (inline search, extensions, URL-based search, middle-click to open single item in a group), but makes up for it by having a clean, navigable UI and fairly rapid page rendering (after you fix a.plist value (specifically, page delay), described in macosxhints.com).
Overall, I like Safari on Mac OS X and Firefox on Windows. One day I may switch to Firefox on the Mac, but I'm going to wait until it matches my experience on Firefox Win first.
At one point I was preparing to go to Germany for further studies (Uni-Erlangen), so I know a little bit about the German education system. (plus my brother's doing his Diplom there right now)
I have to say this: For a long time, I've thought German education was superior to anything we had in North America, but in the course of my interactions with German exchange students over the past few years, I've been told that that notion is quite outdated. Furthermore, many Eastern Europeans and Russians tell me that their science and math education is much more rigorous than what they have in Germany (and has always been).
That's something I never thought about... but it could be true.
Still, I believe some schools are better than others... Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, TU-Muenchen, RWTH Aachen are among the best...
The U of T is very rich overall, but when you normalize research money *per faculty*, McGill tops the list. See here. My feeling is that the money at McGill is not well distributed.
If you look here, you will see the Faculty research intensity at McGill is very high while graduate student research intensity is abysmal (research intensity here is defined in terms of research income). Somehow, grad students at McGill just aren't seeing the money.
You're right about U.S. profs being able to draw salaries from research funds. In Canada, that kind of thing is somehow anathema... Canadian grants have more strings attached.
And you basically can't beat the money that is available to U.S. researchers... it's the richest country in the world, after all. Having said that, it seems harder to secure funds for graduate studies in the U.S. than in Canada (but that's just my experience)
There is a strong American presence at the undergraduate level (nearly 20% of the international student population) so by virtue of that, McGill is *somewhat* well-known in the northeastern U.S., at least among college-bound kids and their parents.
Consider this also: public reputation is not the same as academic reputation.
The McGill name may not be well-known to the U.S. public, but in academic circles it sparks recognition.
Also, I am not sure if it really is much harder to get a job with a foreign degree than a U.S. one, because when I browse faculty pages at most U.S. schools, a good number of professors seem to have foreign graduate degrees (granted, these profs were not American to begin with, but....). Anecdotally, I know of many Canadian profs who teach at U.S. schools.
Having said that, graduate funding at McGill is not as good as it ought to be, despite being a first tier research institution. McGill professors are the richest in the country yet only a limited portion of their funds are used to fund grad students (I wonder why).
So let me point the submitter to some Canadian schools that will *guarantee* graduate funding to anyone who can get into some of their programs (doesn't matter if you're Canadian or not). As far as I can tell, the University of Toronto funds every student accepted.... Info here. University of Alberta, University of Western Ontario, McMaster University funds all students accepted to selected programs.
In my experience, U.S. schools often don't like to fund Masters students because M.S. programs are too short for them to extract any useful research out of the students (projects funded by research grants usually take years). They prefer to fund Ph.D. students.
But in Canada, M.S. students have an almost equal chance of getting funding.
Anyway, as some other poster said, there will be insular schools and outward-looking schools. The United States is a big and diverse country - one cannot really generalize.
(P.S. but sometimes it is tempting... for instance, I was watching Letterman last night, and David Letterman was talking to a lady from Texas (this was on Stupid Pet Tricks). He asked her, "So if you drive west from Texas, you hit New Mexico, right?". She said yes. "What state is west of New Mexico?"... and she said "I don't know". And she's from Texas! I'm not American and even I know Arizona is west of New Mexico. But as I said, the U.S. is a big country... and there are all kinds out there.)
RedFlagDeals is pretty good, especially their Freebies and Hot deals Forums. Other Canadian deal sites:
Rebates Canada - instant rebates as you shop Visa Savings - occasionally get tremendous price reductions (e.g. on IBM Thinkpads) using your Canadian Visa card. PriceNetwork.ca - not as good as RedFlagDeals, but there are some occasional bargains Book coupon codes - coupon codes for Amazon.ca Save.ca - get grocery coupons online
And for buying Amazon stuff, Amazon.com doesn't always have the LOWEST prices (in fact Amazon.ca frequently has the lowest prices):
Pricenoia - international Amazon price comparator to find the lowest prices, with shipping factored in.
Of course, half.com now ships to Canada, and many pricewatch.com merchants now ship internationally. isbn.nu is good for book searches. There's also ebay.ca for the snipers out there.
Staples.ca, FutureShop.ca have PriceMatch policies that can occasionally be exploited to get significantly lower prices. The people in the RedFlagDeal forums will usually bring up any such opportunities as they arise.
If you live in downtown Montreal, The Word bookstore on Milton and Aylmer is VERY VERY good for picking up $1 bargain books. I've bought $1 gems in the past, including almost-new *textbooks* and *rare books* -- they're often in extremely good condition.
Personally I don't have issues with Gmail... in fact I'm looking forward to getting an account.
However, if one is really concerned with privacy, I have to say that the "don't use it" argument dosn't really cut it. While one may not use Gmail directly, invariably one will need to send mails to people with Gmail accounts some time or the other, and the contents of the those mails will end up in Gmail servers.
One might argue that email is inherently public anyway, so sending mail to Gmail address is no different from sending mail to any other email address. (anyone with a packet sniffer in the correct place can peek into the contents of your mail). Well, sure... okay.
But don't keep repeating the cliched "don't use it" credo. It isn't really as simple as that.
You can tweak the speed by pressing F11, F12, Ctrl-F11, Ctrl-F12 or some suchkeys. The default DOSBox runs slowly because it is constrained to using x cycles. You CAN make it faster by giving it more cycles and by lowering the framerate.
It's mentioned somewhere in the docs that are included in the zip.
... is probably what you want. A single GUI app, no Subversion server necessary. It uses a folder on your hard drive as the repository instead of a WebDAV server etc. It seems to implement Subversion internally or something...
I use version control on my local Win32 machine to manage different versions of files. I've used both TortoiseCVS and TortoiseSVN in local repository mode, and I highly recommend TortoiseSVN over TortoiseCVS. Forget CVS, really! SVN is much better, even for personal use. It is lightweight, and you don't have to run any server -- the client manages everything for you. Here's information on running TortoiseSVN in local repository mode (with screenshots and all)
Quote: "If you're not working in a team but working alone on a project and still want your work under version control you can also access a repository locally. This kind of repository access is also very handy if you just want to try out some Subversion commands and you don't want to risk screwing your "official" repository."
No, you're right of course. There is no requirement for developers to support old hardware or old software.
Unfortunately, some users out there still prefer to stick with OS 9 than to upgrade to OS X. They are of the opinion that Apple should have preserved their beloved old interface and way of doing things in OS X. You can't persuade these people to move to OS X... so you have to live with them.
Incidentally, I'm surprised Jaguar runs okay on your beige G3. I'm guessing you maxed out your RAM. From most accounts I've read, Jaguar runs on older machines, but like a dog.... or at least significantly slower than Mac OS 9 on the same machine.
Also, GAIM doesn't have AIM Talk. I use AIM Talk regularly to talk to someone who is running AIM on a Mac OS 9.0.4 machine. (her machine can't run OS X, and OS 9.0.4 is the last stable version)
You'd be surprised how few VoIP proggies exist for OS 9 machines, and even rarer still, proggies that also have Windows clients...
Apart from MSN Messenger (which requires at least 9.2.2), AIM seems to be the only solution.
Plus, if you're French, you will feel quite at home in la belle province, Quebec. Even the metro system feels like the one in France, runs on rubber tires and all.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
It will be a while yet before the oil from Alberta's tar sands are as economical to extract as conventional crude.
Things are looking up though with new extraction techniques. Kudos to those guys at the University of Alberta and University of Calgary.
The Non-commercial stipulation is really not so restrictive as you think.
Software that can be developed include:
1) Open-source, GPL'ed apps
2) Free apps
3) Apps for internal use in an educational institution or charity
4) DAQ-type apps for fieldwork in a research group
5) Personal productivity tools
6) Testing apps
(some of the above overlap)
I'm assuming the Visual Studio Express suite comprises IDEs for .NET, since that's the direction Microsoft is going, big time.
.NET IDEs out there at moment (with caveats, of course): SharpDevelop (GPL, with GUI builder) and Borland's C# Builder Personal Editioin NON-Commercial (you can only make non-commercial apps with this).
There are actually two free
I doubt it.
.NET like the current Visual Studio is. .NET programs are more or less runnable under Mono, but the problem is System.Windows.Forms, which most Windows .NET programs use.
It's likely that the IDEs are written for
System.Windows.Forms support is incomplete in Mono at the moment.
Violence and sexual behavior are facts of life, true, but that doesn't mean everyone has to condone it. And no, I do not agree that they define us as people. People should be able to choose what kinds of values they want to have without being subject to derision. And that doesn't necessarily have to mean that they're necessarily divorced from reality. They just have different values.
I think we're all sick of holier-than-thou attitudes, but let's not stoop to that level ourselves.
Your post confirms something: smugness isn't limited to fundamentalist Christian groups.
Wolverine (in X-Men) was Canadian....
Hovering out and about northern Alberta... I've never been out there, but I'm pretty sure it's not as desolate as the movie makes it out to be....
Spymac is slow, difficult to configure, unreliable and generally ugly. Sure, they give you a 1 GB spymac.com email account, WebDAV space, webspace, iCal hosting etc. but the whole setup lacks finesse and elegance. I wouldn't recommend Spymac anyone except the desperate.
Did I mention it was sloooww?
For free iCal hosting, try icalx.com instead. There exists another free iCal hosting service but I forget the name.
I don't know about government agencies, but I know companies that prohibit the use of Word documents because of the sensitivity of the data.
.doc files or something.
Word documents often contain a lot of meta information and sometimes, even older revisions of stuff, in the file. There was even a story on The Register some time ago about some incriminating information found in some U.S. government
Granted, you can turn off the meta-info and revisions, but most people don't even know it's there in the first place.
The .pps doesn't mean it's standalone. It just an extension to tell Powerpoint (or the viewer) to play the presentation immediately. The file format is exactly the same as .ppt files.
.ppt file to .pps and double click on it. You'll see what I mean.
Try renaming any
I agree, and I've noticed lately that many major sites have been redesigned for scaling e.g. oracle.com. IBM.com still constrains their layout to a fixed resolution though.
I can guess why some people would still want to design fixed-resolution sites. Some of these web-designers probably come from a print background, and as a result of their training, they are stuck with a lot of print-specific notions that are admittedly hard to discard.
I have to concede that designing for a fixed resolution is simply easier in most cases (especially if you use a lot of bitmaps and rely on oldskool 1-px tricks to achieve your layout). Fixed resolutions give you absolute coordinates, which are just more convenient to work with. To some extent, they also help to ensure your layout's robustness across browsers (e.g. a width="30%" doesn't always give you 30% in all browsers) The layout at wolfram.com, for instance, would have been more difficult to achieve using scalable elements.
CSS solves a big part of the problem by giving you a level of control that allows for precision layout, but unfortunately some elements like bitmaps just don't scale (and SVG isn't widespread yet).
The other (albeit inadvertent) benefit of contraining the size of a page to a lowest-common-denominator fixed resolution like 640x480, is that it keeps the text-width small for the majority of people who run at higher resolutions. The advantage of doing this is the same as the advantage of having columns: studies have shown that shorter text-widths make for higher readability.
Having said that, I prefer scalable-resolution websites myself.
At the end of the day, it's about achieving a balance between function and form. And it's really really hard to do, so most people choose one or the other. Props to you if you can do both.
Take a look at this:
BEEP, the Application Protocol Framework
http://www.beepcore.org/beepcore/about_qanda.jsp
I use Firefox on my XP machine and Safari 1.2.2 on my OS X machine. In my humble opinion, Firefox isn't tHAT similar to Safari.... any resemblance is at best superficial, i.e. the baseline behavior you'd expect from any browser (except IE).
.plist value (specifically, page delay), described in macosxhints.com).
I have to say that my user experience on Firefox Win is definitely more positive than Firefox on OS X... the Windows version is just snappier and more polished than its Mac counterpart.
Safari on the other hand, lacks some useful features that Firefox has (inline search, extensions, URL-based search, middle-click to open single item in a group), but makes up for it by having a clean, navigable UI and fairly rapid page rendering (after you fix a
Overall, I like Safari on Mac OS X and Firefox on Windows. One day I may switch to Firefox on the Mac, but I'm going to wait until it matches my experience on Firefox Win first.
Canada has 10 provinces and 3 territories. Some of the provinces are bigger than your average U.S. state, both in area and population.
So in reality, Canada could well be the 51st through 63rd states.
Slow day eh....
Thanks for this insightful piece.
At one point I was preparing to go to Germany for further studies (Uni-Erlangen), so I know a little bit about the German education system. (plus my brother's doing his Diplom there right now)
I have to say this: For a long time, I've thought German education was superior to anything we had in North America, but in the course of my interactions with German exchange students over the past few years, I've been told that that notion is quite outdated. Furthermore, many Eastern Europeans and Russians tell me that their science and math education is much more rigorous than what they have in Germany (and has always been).
That's something I never thought about... but it could be true.
Still, I believe some schools are better than others... Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, TU-Muenchen, RWTH Aachen are among the best...
Actually, let me qualify that.
The U of T is very rich overall, but when you normalize research money *per faculty*, McGill tops the list. See here. My feeling is that the money at McGill is not well distributed.
If you look here, you will see the Faculty research intensity at McGill is very high while graduate student research intensity is abysmal (research intensity here is defined in terms of research income). Somehow, grad students at McGill just aren't seeing the money.
You're right about U.S. profs being able to draw salaries from research funds. In Canada, that kind of thing is somehow anathema... Canadian grants have more strings attached.
And you basically can't beat the money that is available to U.S. researchers... it's the richest country in the world, after all. Having said that, it seems harder to secure funds for graduate studies in the U.S. than in Canada (but that's just my experience)
I am a McGill alumnus, so I am biased...
There is a strong American presence at the undergraduate level (nearly 20% of the international student population) so by virtue of that, McGill is *somewhat* well-known in the northeastern U.S., at least among college-bound kids and their parents.
See this article on McGill University for an idea. Many of the alumni are household names in the U.S.
Consider this also: public reputation is not the same as academic reputation.
The McGill name may not be well-known to the U.S. public, but in academic circles it sparks recognition.
Also, I am not sure if it really is much harder to get a job with a foreign degree than a U.S. one, because when I browse faculty pages at most U.S. schools, a good number of professors seem to have foreign graduate degrees (granted, these profs were not American to begin with, but....). Anecdotally, I know of many Canadian profs who teach at U.S. schools.
Having said that, graduate funding at McGill is not as good as it ought to be, despite being a first tier research institution. McGill professors are the richest in the country yet only a limited portion of their funds are used to fund grad students (I wonder why).
So let me point the submitter to some Canadian schools that will *guarantee* graduate funding to anyone who can get into some of their programs (doesn't matter if you're Canadian or not). As far as I can tell, the University of Toronto funds every student accepted.... Info here. University of Alberta, University of Western Ontario, McMaster University funds all students accepted to selected programs.
In my experience, U.S. schools often don't like to fund Masters students because M.S. programs are too short for them to extract any useful research out of the students (projects funded by research grants usually take years). They prefer to fund Ph.D. students.
But in Canada, M.S. students have an almost equal chance of getting funding.
Anyway, as some other poster said, there will be insular schools and outward-looking schools. The United States is a big and diverse country - one cannot really generalize.
(P.S. but sometimes it is tempting... for instance, I was watching Letterman last night, and David Letterman was talking to a lady from Texas (this was on Stupid Pet Tricks). He asked her, "So if you drive west from Texas, you hit New Mexico, right?". She said yes. "What state is west of New Mexico?"... and she said "I don't know". And she's from Texas! I'm not American and even I know Arizona is west of New Mexico. But as I said, the U.S. is a big country... and there are all kinds out there.)
RedFlagDeals is pretty good, especially their Freebies and Hot deals Forums. Other Canadian deal sites:
Rebates Canada - instant rebates as you shop
Visa Savings - occasionally get tremendous price reductions (e.g. on IBM Thinkpads) using your Canadian Visa card.
PriceNetwork.ca - not as good as RedFlagDeals, but there are some occasional bargains
Book coupon codes - coupon codes for Amazon.ca
Save.ca - get grocery coupons online
And for buying Amazon stuff, Amazon.com doesn't always have the LOWEST prices (in fact Amazon.ca frequently has the lowest prices):
Pricenoia - international Amazon price comparator to find the lowest prices, with shipping factored in.
Of course, half.com now ships to Canada, and many pricewatch.com merchants now ship internationally. isbn.nu is good for book searches. There's also ebay.ca for the snipers out there.
Staples.ca, FutureShop.ca have PriceMatch policies that can occasionally be exploited to get significantly lower prices. The people in the RedFlagDeal forums will usually bring up any such opportunities as they arise.
If you live in downtown Montreal, The Word bookstore on Milton and Aylmer is VERY VERY good for picking up $1 bargain books. I've bought $1 gems in the past, including almost-new *textbooks* and *rare books* -- they're often in extremely good condition.
More screenshots here.
Personally I don't have issues with Gmail... in fact I'm looking forward to getting an account.
However, if one is really concerned with privacy, I have to say that the "don't use it" argument dosn't really cut it. While one may not use Gmail directly, invariably one will need to send mails to people with Gmail accounts some time or the other, and the contents of the those mails will end up in Gmail servers.
One might argue that email is inherently public anyway, so sending mail to Gmail address is no different from sending mail to any other email address. (anyone with a packet sniffer in the correct place can peek into the contents of your mail). Well, sure... okay.
But don't keep repeating the cliched "don't use it" credo. It isn't really as simple as that.
You can tweak the speed by pressing F11, F12, Ctrl-F11, Ctrl-F12 or some suchkeys. The default DOSBox runs slowly because it is constrained to using x cycles. You CAN make it faster by giving it more cycles and by lowering the framerate.
It's mentioned somewhere in the docs that are included in the zip.
... is probably what you want. A single GUI app, no Subversion server necessary. It uses a folder on your hard drive as the repository instead of a WebDAV server etc. It seems to implement Subversion internally or something...
TortoiseSVN is here
I use version control on my local Win32 machine to manage different versions of files. I've used both TortoiseCVS and TortoiseSVN in local repository mode, and I highly recommend TortoiseSVN over TortoiseCVS. Forget CVS, really! SVN is much better, even for personal use. It is lightweight, and you don't have to run any server -- the client manages everything for you. Here's information on running TortoiseSVN in local repository mode (with screenshots and all)
Quote:
"If you're not working in a team but working alone on a project and still want your work under version control you can also access a repository locally. This kind of repository access is also very handy if you just want to try out some Subversion commands and you don't want to risk screwing your "official" repository."
No, you're right of course. There is no requirement for developers to support old hardware or old software.
Unfortunately, some users out there still prefer to stick with OS 9 than to upgrade to OS X. They are of the opinion that Apple should have preserved their beloved old interface and way of doing things in OS X. You can't persuade these people to move to OS X... so you have to live with them.
Incidentally, I'm surprised Jaguar runs okay on your beige G3. I'm guessing you maxed out your RAM. From most accounts I've read, Jaguar runs on older machines, but like a dog.... or at least significantly slower than Mac OS 9 on the same machine.
Also, GAIM doesn't have AIM Talk. I use AIM Talk regularly to talk to someone who is running AIM on a Mac OS 9.0.4 machine. (her machine can't run OS X, and OS 9.0.4 is the last stable version)
You'd be surprised how few VoIP proggies exist for OS 9 machines, and even rarer still, proggies that also have Windows clients...
Apart from MSN Messenger (which requires at least 9.2.2), AIM seems to be the only solution.
...you should see this episode of Futurama. Fry gets a tax rebate from dead Nixon and resolves to drink 100 cups of coffee....
And then something happens....
Yup. Canada.
;-)
Plus, if you're French, you will feel quite at home in la belle province, Quebec. Even the metro system feels like the one in France, runs on rubber tires and all.