Except that english is not doing well on it's own. In 1950 quebec city (800 000 people ) was 50 % english, now it is down to 2%. Similar stats for many smaller towns. Montreal (3.7 million people ) was 16 % english in the 1050s, it is down to about 8 % now and is not expected to survive this generation. Quebec has lost about 400 000 english speakers since the 1970s.
I am a web developer from english canada ( BC ) that has been living here for 4 years. My website must be in french only because I am doing business in quebec. If I pass out a business card in english, i am subject to a $1400 fine. If I put an english sign on my balcony I will be forced to take it down by the police. Inspectors come into my work on a regular basis to check that my documentation is in french and to check that I have signed the appropriate documents to have my computer in english. My friends from the US are not allowed to send their kids to school in english. If I want to see a movie that is not available in french, it is only allowed to be played in one movie theater in the province for a maximum time period as a "film festival" exception to the language laws. Go rent it? All films must be approved by the goverments and have a sticker approving it, blockbuster is not allowed more than one copy. That is if the movie is available, trailers for english only movies are also illegal on TV. And that is just the law, never mind the attitudes of the people I have to deal with all the time. My first christmas dinner at my boyfriend's house was turned into a buffet because his brother refused to have his children sit next to an english person. I can rarely have a conversation in english in a bar in my neighbourhood ( the plateau ) without getting harassed.
Before I moved here, I went to bilingual school in BC, and was proud to be bilingual. If I would have known what I know now, I would not have wasted my time learning about a language and culture that does not respect mine as equal.
Well they got you there too. These laws come from l'Office de la langue francaise. This same legal body defines the french language as spoken in quebec, tells us what is legally a word, and what is not a word.
Perhaps I should have been more precise. Canadian banks are more consolidated than the US banking system.
Canada has roughly 1/10 of the population of the U.S. When I see canadian government expenditures, for example, I am in the habit of multiplying be 10 and looking for similar expenditures in the U.S.
According to this rule, in order for Citibank to be as influential in the U.S., it would have to have revenues of $240 billion U.S. to compare to our Royal Bank.
I am quite sure that Royal has more bank machines per capita than Citi, which validates my earlier point.
The NDP is pretty tech savvy usually. They have two other platform points that are interesting, although populist:
Ban bank fees for using competing banks ATMs. Canadian banks are much larger than their american counterparts, and are more profitable. The mortgage crisis here has been avoided due to more goverment regulation, and the banks are expected to continue to profit at the expense of poorer people who are hit with elevated service charges. Bank fees on ATMs stiffle competition by encouraging people to stay with the big five banks that have the power to litter every city with thousands of bank machines. In quélbec almost all of the ATMs are in the hands of one credit union in quebec , la caisse populaire desjardins, which has 80% + of the market here.
Ban cellphone contracts and cellphone locking and allow users to switch companies while keeping their telephone number. The allowing to switch companies while keeping your number has already been implemented by the canadian govt, but the 3 year cellphone contract remains. The government also auctioned off a large chunk of spectrum, reserving a large percentage for new contenders. We are on the right path, but the contracts are prohibitive to competition.
Disclaimer: I am not an NDP supporter, I am actually a card carrying liberal. I just like these policies.
Funny, slashdot does not even render on winfari! It looks like there is a css problem; all the links in the article headers + footers either do not show up, or show up as underlined whitespace. Other sites are rendering equally poorly. Is anyone else having this problem?
Re:"Macs aren't more expensive..[shipped] with an
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 1
What I would like to have is a comparison of how many developers apple has working on os X, vs. microsoft working on windows. It seems to me that apple can develop features faster and better than microsoft, and with what I assume are less resources. How can apple promise a feature like spotlight and develop it in a less than a year and a half, for example, and windows users are still waiting. In fact, most if the features of vista have been available for years on os x, the vista release date keeps slipping and the feature list keeps atrophying, and apple jumps another light year ahead of microsoft with each point release of os X. At this rate, windows will NEVER catch up. os x is just getting much better too fast. So my question is again, what are the stats on how much apple spends on os x development for such monumental gains, and why cannot microsoft with all its money hire the developers needed to, if not catch up, at least keep pace with apple?
No you would have to learn french, but guaranteed, it would take some time before you were functional in french, never mind fluent, and you would NEVER loose your accent. So after putting years of hard work into learning the local language, you would expect some patience and understanding, and if you encountered xenophobic fury from a local instead of patience when trying to function in their language, that would discourage you from continuing yur studies in that language. This xenophobia exists everywhere with varying degrees of intensity, and under many labels. English tolerance for foreign accents, gramatical structures, and vocabulary is one reason it has such global appeal as a second language. French has the concept of "correct" and "incorrect" grammar, as put for ward by the accademie française. Hearing "Ugly American Who Only Speaks English" , even if voiced by a tiny fraction of the populous, gives you an extremely bad impression of the nationality of the issuer. That is why we discourage expressions like "Mexican who only speaks Spanish". If you want them to learn english, youu have to make them feel comfortable and accepted first. Else you will get ghettos.
Actually, oracle 10g runs on os X, not just the client, but the full database, and JDeveloper/SQL Developer. Sybase ASE 12.5.3 and SQL Developer are also available. And Sam Pullara from BEA, who has been doing his dev work on a PowerBook for over a year now, has released his notes on how to do it.
I personally bought my first mac as a way to develop on the road without a network connection. I was working in PHP/MySQL/Apache on Linux and using Dreamweaver/Photoshop on a Windows machine at home. The mac replaced both the machines so well, that after a few months, I just stopped using the other machines. Now 3 years later, I only have macs in my home.
BTW, I am studying CompuSci at university, and thus far, no course has required any technology that is not readily available on my PowerBook G4. This platform really is the best of both worlds, easy enough for mom to use, but you can take it as far as you want, it is as powerfull a development machine as anyone could hope for. It has the perfect mix of opensource power and polished commercial apps that are not available on any other platform out there.
"The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living was a groundbreaking collaboration between H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama, and Howard C. Cutler, M.D., a Phoenix-based psychiatrist. Beginning with a small first printing in 1998 the book rapidly spread by word of mouth to become a classic manual on human happiness. The book remained on The New York Times bestseller list for almost two years..."
"Drawing upon 2500 years of Buddhist wisdom, combined with the latest findings of modern science, and mixed with a healthy dose of common sense, these remarkable volumes offer a practical approach to human happiness--a rational approach that can be practiced by individuals from any background, tradition, or religion."
For smaller projects where you just want the client updating small portions of the website without knowing html, there is a product from Macromedia called "Contribute". This product is a client side solution, not a server side one, so no databases, programming languages, or server configuration is necessary. It uses HTML comments to designate which areas of a page are editable and which are not. Access can be granted based on HTML comments in the doument or by restricting entire folders.
Note: This is not meant to be a secure application, it does not actually prevent people from editing pages except at a client side application level. Contribute respects the HTML comments, but there is nothing stopping the user from FTP'ing directly to the site and circumventing contribute's access "hints".
That being said, it is a great quick and dirty way of letting people create new pages and edit existing ones based on templates that you design. You can easily create a page with navigation bars and logos, but define a huge area as "editable". Clients can create hundreds of pages based on this template then later, you can edit the template to update the navigation, and contribute will regex (search and replace) all documents on the site based on that template and FTP them to the server. It is even possible to create a heirarcy of templates, so that changes to a parent template will trickle down to child templates and then to all pages that inherit from those templates.
Another nice thing is that, being a macromedia product, it integrates well with dreamweaver. A contribute template is no different than a Dreamweaver template, except that it has security permissions mapped on top.
Office for Mac is better than for windows in many respects and I do use work and excel for mac often, but if you ever use powerpoint, apple makes a similar product called keynote that is much much better. I also prefer the simplicity iCal and "Mail" over the feature-creap madness of outlook anyday. Actually, simplicity is the real reason we switched to mac, isn't it?
As a new mac user, i see this simple user interface in front of me and I start worrying about all of the work i am going to have to do to maintain it: learning new things, customizing, installing, tweaking, defreaging, virus-scanning, re-installing, etc that I will have to do. Remember, this is a mac. just plug it in and go. it is there to get your work done faster, not a basement-built hobby machine that needs constant maintenance.
Just as a side question, does microsoft think we love performing neverending system maintenance? or is it an evil plan to suck away time that we could be suing them or writing competing software?
So make your work "much more impressive visually". I am a backend guy, but I went to design school for 2 years part-time while working as a web developer. This does not make me a graphic designer, but it does prevent me from making design mistakes common to other programmers, my prototypes look almost good enough to go live, and when i do have to call in a graphic designer, i can talk to them in their language and make them feel appreciated.
Failing that, at least read The Non-Designer's Design Book. The concepts in this book (page layout and design) apply to software design too.
save yourself a lot of hastle and buy a mac. Then you can run " MM Fireworks/Photoshop/Mozilla/Flash Development " on BSD and bye bye samba. Why have a desk clutered with dozens of crappy old underpowered bulky noisy beige boxen when you can have one simple, elegant machine replace them all?
This is a British endeavor, and only the US would have this problem. The only country in the world that uses one measurement system among themselves, and another to deal with everybody else.
not really. christianity is a closely related group of cults, some of the more sucessfull of which include catholics, baptists, scientologist, and alcoholics anonymous. judaism is more of a framwork for creating cults.
OS X is the ultimate user interface. and what else runs dreamweaver / flash / photoshop / illustrator? the desktop environments available on linux cannot compare.
linux, however, is what i trust for my servers. i trust apple to make my OS secure, but i do not trust them to respect my modifications to the OS between software updates. Apple has screwed up my PHP / MySQL / Apache customization before and i was not impressed. RedHat is much better in this respect.
Slashdot Mirror
A short video on the decline of english in quebec:
http://archives.cbc.ca/politics/language_culture/clips/15097/
Except that english is not doing well on it's own. In 1950 quebec city (800 000 people ) was 50 % english, now it is down to 2%. Similar stats for many smaller towns. Montreal (3.7 million people ) was 16 % english in the 1050s, it is down to about 8 % now and is not expected to survive this generation. Quebec has lost about 400 000 english speakers since the 1970s.
I am a web developer from english canada ( BC ) that has been living here for 4 years. My website must be in french only because I am doing business in quebec. If I pass out a business card in english, i am subject to a $1400 fine. If I put an english sign on my balcony I will be forced to take it down by the police. Inspectors come into my work on a regular basis to check that my documentation is in french and to check that I have signed the appropriate documents to have my computer in english. My friends from the US are not allowed to send their kids to school in english. If I want to see a movie that is not available in french, it is only allowed to be played in one movie theater in the province for a maximum time period as a "film festival" exception to the language laws. Go rent it? All films must be approved by the goverments and have a sticker approving it, blockbuster is not allowed more than one copy. That is if the movie is available, trailers for english only movies are also illegal on TV. And that is just the law, never mind the attitudes of the people I have to deal with all the time. My first christmas dinner at my boyfriend's house was turned into a buffet because his brother refused to have his children sit next to an english person. I can rarely have a conversation in english in a bar in my neighbourhood ( the plateau ) without getting harassed.
Before I moved here, I went to bilingual school in BC, and was proud to be bilingual. If I would have known what I know now, I would not have wasted my time learning about a language and culture that does not respect mine as equal.
Well they got you there too. These laws come from l'Office de la langue francaise. This same legal body defines the french language as spoken in quebec, tells us what is legally a word, and what is not a word.
Perhaps I should have been more precise. Canadian banks are more consolidated than the US banking system.
Canada has roughly 1/10 of the population of the U.S. When I see canadian government expenditures, for example, I am in the habit of multiplying be 10 and looking for similar expenditures in the U.S.
According to this rule, in order for Citibank to be as influential in the U.S., it would have to have revenues of $240 billion U.S. to compare to our Royal Bank.
I am quite sure that Royal has more bank machines per capita than Citi, which validates my earlier point.
The NDP is pretty tech savvy usually. They have two other platform points that are interesting, although populist:
Disclaimer: I am not an NDP supporter, I am actually a card carrying liberal. I just like these policies.
so according to the posted list, apple will be surpassing IBM's market cap soon, which will really scare the crap out of microsoft.
IBM Global Services is an insanely large chunk of IBM's revenue, and they are not doing too well AFAIK.
Funny, slashdot does not even render on winfari! It looks like there is a css problem; all the links in the article headers + footers either do not show up, or show up as underlined whitespace. Other sites are rendering equally poorly. Is anyone else having this problem?
do you have to ask? The site is ASP.
That`s hot.
What I would like to have is a comparison of how many developers apple has working on os X, vs. microsoft working on windows. It seems to me that apple can develop features faster and better than microsoft, and with what I assume are less resources. How can apple promise a feature like spotlight and develop it in a less than a year and a half, for example, and windows users are still waiting. In fact, most if the features of vista have been available for years on os x, the vista release date keeps slipping and the feature list keeps atrophying, and apple jumps another light year ahead of microsoft with each point release of os X. At this rate, windows will NEVER catch up. os x is just getting much better too fast. So my question is again, what are the stats on how much apple spends on os x development for such monumental gains, and why cannot microsoft with all its money hire the developers needed to, if not catch up, at least keep pace with apple?
No you would have to learn french, but guaranteed, it would take some time before you were functional in french, never mind fluent, and you would NEVER loose your accent. So after putting years of hard work into learning the local language, you would expect some patience and understanding, and if you encountered xenophobic fury from a local instead of patience when trying to function in their language, that would discourage you from continuing yur studies in that language. This xenophobia exists everywhere with varying degrees of intensity, and under many labels. English tolerance for foreign accents, gramatical structures, and vocabulary is one reason it has such global appeal as a second language. French has the concept of "correct" and "incorrect" grammar, as put for ward by the accademie française. Hearing "Ugly American Who Only Speaks English" , even if voiced by a tiny fraction of the populous, gives you an extremely bad impression of the nationality of the issuer. That is why we discourage expressions like "Mexican who only speaks Spanish". If you want them to learn english, youu have to make them feel comfortable and accepted first. Else you will get ghettos.
Actually, oracle 10g runs on os X, not just the client, but the full database, and JDeveloper/SQL Developer. Sybase ASE 12.5.3 and SQL Developer are also available. And Sam Pullara from BEA, who has been doing his dev work on a PowerBook for over a year now, has released his notes on how to do it.
I personally bought my first mac as a way to develop on the road without a network connection. I was working in PHP/MySQL/Apache on Linux and using Dreamweaver/Photoshop on a Windows machine at home. The mac replaced both the machines so well, that after a few months, I just stopped using the other machines. Now 3 years later, I only have macs in my home.
BTW, I am studying CompuSci at university, and thus far, no course has required any technology that is not readily available on my PowerBook G4. This platform really is the best of both worlds, easy enough for mom to use, but you can take it as far as you want, it is as powerfull a development machine as anyone could hope for. It has the perfect mix of opensource power and polished commercial apps that are not available on any other platform out there.
Yeah, 500 ml of milk is a great snack too. And if you need some caffeine, a starbucks latte is always a good thing.
Yeah right, foreigners are the only people who are guaranteed to have a medical plan. ;-)
Yes, and as for the wireless stereo connection, just use the airport basestation.
"The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living was a groundbreaking collaboration between H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama, and Howard C. Cutler, M.D., a Phoenix-based psychiatrist. Beginning with a small first printing in 1998 the book rapidly spread by word of mouth to become a classic manual on human happiness. The book remained on The New York Times bestseller list for almost two years..."
"Drawing upon 2500 years of Buddhist wisdom, combined with the latest findings of modern science, and mixed with a healthy dose of common sense, these remarkable volumes offer a practical approach to human happiness--a rational approach that can be practiced by individuals from any background, tradition, or religion."
For smaller projects where you just want the client updating small portions of the website without knowing html, there is a product from Macromedia called "Contribute". This product is a client side solution, not a server side one, so no databases, programming languages, or server configuration is necessary. It uses HTML comments to designate which areas of a page are editable and which are not. Access can be granted based on HTML comments in the doument or by restricting entire folders.
Note: This is not meant to be a secure application, it does not actually prevent people from editing pages except at a client side application level. Contribute respects the HTML comments, but there is nothing stopping the user from FTP'ing directly to the site and circumventing contribute's access "hints".
That being said, it is a great quick and dirty way of letting people create new pages and edit existing ones based on templates that you design. You can easily create a page with navigation bars and logos, but define a huge area as "editable". Clients can create hundreds of pages based on this template then later, you can edit the template to update the navigation, and contribute will regex (search and replace) all documents on the site based on that template and FTP them to the server. It is even possible to create a heirarcy of templates, so that changes to a parent template will trickle down to child templates and then to all pages that inherit from those templates.
Another nice thing is that, being a macromedia product, it integrates well with dreamweaver. A contribute template is no different than a Dreamweaver template, except that it has security permissions mapped on top.
Do jews believe in Hell?
Office for Mac is better than for windows in many respects and I do use work and excel for mac often, but if you ever use powerpoint, apple makes a similar product called keynote that is much much better. I also prefer the simplicity iCal and "Mail" over the feature-creap madness of outlook anyday. Actually, simplicity is the real reason we switched to mac, isn't it?
As a new mac user, i see this simple user interface in front of me and I start worrying about all of the work i am going to have to do to maintain it: learning new things, customizing, installing, tweaking, defreaging, virus-scanning, re-installing, etc that I will have to do. Remember, this is a mac. just plug it in and go. it is there to get your work done faster, not a basement-built hobby machine that needs constant maintenance.
Just as a side question, does microsoft think we love performing neverending system maintenance? or is it an evil plan to suck away time that we could be suing them or writing competing software?
Failing that, at least read The Non-Designer's Design Book. The concepts in this book (page layout and design) apply to software design too.
8 bit D & D parody
save yourself a lot of hastle and buy a mac. Then you can run " MM Fireworks/Photoshop/Mozilla/Flash Development " on BSD and bye bye samba. Why have a desk clutered with dozens of crappy old underpowered bulky noisy beige boxen when you can have one simple, elegant machine replace them all?
This is a British endeavor, and only the US would have this problem. The only country in the world that uses one measurement system among themselves, and another to deal with everybody else.
not really. christianity is a closely related group of cults, some of the more sucessfull of which include catholics, baptists, scientologist, and alcoholics anonymous. judaism is more of a framwork for creating cults.
I run both.
OS X is the ultimate user interface. and what else runs dreamweaver / flash / photoshop / illustrator? the desktop environments available on linux cannot compare.
linux, however, is what i trust for my servers. i trust apple to make my OS secure, but i do not trust them to respect my modifications to the OS between software updates. Apple has screwed up my PHP / MySQL / Apache customization before and i was not impressed. RedHat is much better in this respect.