If anyone says Emacs or Vi they are insane and have never done 10k lines of code in a modern environment.
I've worked on projects much larger than 10k loc, in vim. Without syntax highlighting, completion, folding, etc. Of course vim can do all those things, I just don't use them. I mostly use 4-8 terminals with a couple dedicated to compiling and/or deploying webapps, and editing files in the rest.
The point is: different tools work for different people. Just because you like one set of tools doesn't mean that set of tools is objectively better, or is going to be good for any particular person.
Bullshit. The negatives in Polaroid film are silver-halide emulsions just like any standard film. They have the same grain limitations that other films do. A few seconds of googling turned this up:
Sorry, I get it. Everybody has a point of view. And, in this example, the Chinese point of view is that Taiwan is a renegade province of China. And you can make a map that expresses this point of view -- I'm sure they are hanging on walls throughout China.
But you can also make a neutral map that expresses reality. In this map, Taiwan would be its own country. It's an objective fact that Taiwan is a self-governing country, and no amount of Chinese objection (or other countries' diplomatic niceties, for that matter) changes that.
I believe that every thorny geopolitical problem, from Cyprus, to the Palestinian territories, to Kashmir can be neutrally and objectively represented on a map. Of course many people will produce maps to promote their desired outcome of those conflicts, but that doesn't mean that every map expresses a point of view. It means that maps, unlike those other forms of expression, can be neutral.
I would label it Taiwan. It is an objective fact that there is an independent government there. Just because someone else doesn't like a fact, doesn't make it go away.
Can you really blame them for not believing that "normal" Britons go around looking at planes on military bases and keeping track of the call letters in their little books? While on vacation to Greece?
I certainly think the British government should have applied more pressure to get them out of jail sooner. But you have to admit their behavior was suspicious.
Anything with words in can be accused of having racist and/or sexist biases. Just for one extreme fictional example, imagine something like this: http://www.snopes.com/humor/question/mathtest.asp -- but it doesn't have to be ridiculous like that. It could just be the race and sex composition of the smiling faces on the cover.
Anything written by people can be tainted by other works by those people, or by private comments they have made. Anything published by a company can be tainted by other books they've published, how they treat their employees, where they get their supplies, etc.
So I can understand why you think math isn't polarizing, but in a poisoned political environment like California, anything can be politicized.
Just as in ancient times, librarians are working on these problems.
Failing hard drives are only a problem if you foolishly store data on only one drive, or on only one system. Most of the people I know store multiple copies locally, and as many copies remotely as they can. For example, the system I work with every day has data at three main sites: one in my library's server room, one in another place on campus, and a third in another part of the state. Each of these sites has redundant drives, tape backups, etc.
Formats that nobody can read is a larger problem, but mainly for access systems (as opposed to preservation systems). The images most people can use are low res, low quality and in formats that change every few years. When the format changes, you throw them away. The images that are stored long-term are in lossless, open, well-documented formats, like TIFF and PDF.
Accidental deletes can be a problem, depending on who has access to what data. Multiple sites help if there are problems. Rigorous checking of the files periodically (like checking the md5sums), helps find problems too.
There are a lot of people thinking very hard about how to make this stuff last as long as possible. Libraries typically don't have huge budgets, and digitizing and preserving materials is very costly compared to what we usually do. So there's a lot of focus on doing things right the first time, learning from other people's mistakes, etc.
We've all seen that "fixing the spam problem is impossible" form letter. In fact, I think I've even posted it here on slashdot and probably on usenet back in the day.
But I think parent is basically correct: the only practical way to end spam is to make it unprofitable. Ending the rewards for spamming is truly impossible. Criminalizing it is possible, but ineffective. Filtering hides the problem but doesn't fix it. Technical solutions will at best result in an arms race, because there is so much money at stake. Increasing the cost of sending spam is the only way.
The the problem is figuring out how to make spammers pay without destroying email as a communications tool in the process.
Having every email cost a cent (given to the recipient) will go a long way. Micropayments won't be needed because the transactions are already intermediated by ISPs, so they can handle the payment differences amongst themselves in bulk, and then charge their customers accordingly.
Most senders of email will send and receive roughly the same amount of email, so they will not be affected much. They will get a quota from their ISPs, and if they send a lot more than they receive, they will have to pay for it. In an ideal world, people would be cut off after they hit their quota, so if they were zombied, they wouldn't rack up thousands of dollars in email sending fees. I would hope that getting cut off from sending email for the rest of the month would help motivate people to clean up their PCs, too.
Bulk emailers (newsletters, confirmation emails, etc.) will need a separate system. Some of them can simply pay for it (I'm sure Amazon can simply charge you an extra five cents to pay for the confirmation emails they send you). Maybe others can require return confirmation, or even pre-confirmation. If they don't get an email from you, you don't get emailed your newsletter, etc.
I switched from a completely non-technical position to a being programmer. Though it took me about two years and several small steps. Basically, I kept learning relevant skills, and when there were gaps (because of people quitting, or new stuff that I found that needed doing), I was there and able to do the work.
My first transition was from general office work to being the "computer guy" at a small company. I got this job because I knew the most about Linux, so when the old computer guy left, I was the most qualified.
I got another job doing documentation and tech support for a small project. I taught myself enough Perl to do some simple CGIs, and found some simple apps that I could do. This got me noticed and officially licensed to do some programming in addition to my other duties. Then I took some night classes in Java and got promoted to a full-time developer.
Since you already know how to code, I'd suggest finding people in your company who need help. I knew a lot of people who were doing really mind-numbing repetitive work in Excel or by hand to do statistics or reports. So I wrote some Perl scripts to automate some of that, or setup Excel files better to automate the statistics generation. I found it really helpful to have people who would vouch for me along the lines of "I used to spend hours doing that, and he wrote a program that would do it in 5 minutes". That obviously helps a lot more if you can move to a developer position in your company.
99% of people will be fine with just knowing that someone doesn't work the company any more. The HR people need to know he's fired, because it might affect final pay, benefits, etc. Very few people need to know why someone was fired.
And there's a big difference between saying "Joe was fired" and "Joe was fired for not following our reimbursement regulations, so don't forget to follow the rules" and "Joe was fired because he couldn't follow our reimbursement regulations about alcohol". That's where the malice test comes in.
I think employees suing their employers is a special case, because the employer has a lot of private info on the employee. So they can take things out of context and ruin somebody's reputation, make it hard for them to get another job, etc.
I'm not sure libel is the best way to handle this problem. But there need to be limits on what employers can say about their employees and former employees because the company is in a position to abuse the private info they have.
As a developer, I find my self doing this far more than I'd like. I've used proxies that dump headers and firefox extensions to view the headers and all that. But they all screw up other stuff or fail to work sometimes. So there's something really nice about
$ telnet server 80
Connected to server.
Escape character is '^]'
HEAD/foo/bar?baz=quux HTTP/1.0
etc.
What I would really like to see is movie theaters and the like being able to broadcast a signal that would automatically force phones into silent mode. Because I really don't care if the guy on the other side of the theater is texting or talking. But the ringing and beeping carries through the whole theater.
I would find this a useful service, too, since I sometimes forget to put my phone in silent mode. Or, more often, forget to take it out of silent mode when the movie's over and miss a call because I don't hear it.
This seems like a much more reasonable balance to me. Considerate people can still take important calls discreetly. Assholes who talk and annoy people around them (whether a phone is involved or not) should be booted.
The original looks bad because it's a low-res version, and the altered version looks better because it's a hi-res version from AP.
The bad photoshopping is how completely synthetic the flag looks. It doesn't even look passably real. A decent photoshop would at least use a real picture of a flag with similar lighting to the original photo, so the contrast between the subject and background is so jarring it's obviously been altered.
Assuming your metadata isn't too complicated (and since you're using CSV, I'm assuming it isn't), it should be very simple to convert it to MARC using MARC4J. I'm not sure if there are similar libraries for Perl or other languages.
In fact, I'd be happy to help you with this, since it's pretty ridiculous to be charging for such a simple service. You can email me at escowles [at] ucsd.edu.
The vast majority of the mainstream media does not have a strong ideological bias. Fox News would be the major exception to this. But all of the mainstream media (including Fox) have a corporate bias -- they are owned and controlled by media and industrial conglomerates who don't want bad press. They want ratings so they can make money from their customers (advertisers), and they don't want to offend their advertisers.
So content-free he-said/she-said stories are ideal. They cost very little to produce, provide the illusion of fair and thoughtful coverage, and are perfect for easily producing sensationalist teasers and headlines (just take the most extreme claim by one side, twist it till it screams, and then rephrase it as a question: "Is Barack Obama a Socialist?"). Political stories are the best for this, since there are well-defined teams that can be easily riled up, and there is a constant stream of ridiculous accusations flying around during the now-never-ending campaign season. Sex and violence are close runners-up, since titillation, outrage and fear are also good motivators to get people to watch.
So I think these media coverage statistics can be easily explained by the fact that Obama's campaign was largely about his biography and his agenda, and McCain's campaign was mostly accusations about Obama's biography and agenda. This resulted in a lot of easy (and easily sensationalized) stories about Obama. Add to this the difference in enthusiasm between Obama's supporters and McCain's, and the actual newsworthiness of his candidacy, and it shouldn't be surprising that he got more coverage.
Modern phones have programmable phonebooks built in. It would be very easy to have something like this added to the phone options: if the number isn't in my phonebook, don't ring.
Other than being a well-known fake, the biggest problem with this analogy is that it leaves out the income of each of the men. If the tenth man is making as much money as the other nine put together, then paying 60% of the tab is about as affordable for him as what the other people are paying (given that basic necessities, etc. are a smaller share of his income).
So while it seems unfair that the richest person should pay such a large share, in fact the burden is being shared pretty fairly. Progressive taxation, and estate taxes, are designed to share the tax burden and prevent extreme concentrations of wealth. Concentration of wealth was a big factor in creating the Great Depression, and a large part of the New Deal was to reverse the trend and lessen its effects. We have gotten back close to the same concentration of wealth as the 1920's, and I hope the correction is less devastating this time.
There was a unionization drive for IT at my university not so long ago. I wasn't allowed to vote in the election because I was a technically a temp worker at the time, but I would definitely have voted "no".
I've got great working conditions: great benefits, good career development (books, classes, conferences, etc. paid for), good hours (nominally 9-5, but with flexibility for me to pick up my kids, etc.), and very good working conditions (telecommute full-time from another state, at the time of the vote I was telecommuting from another country). I'm treated with respect and encouraged to voice my opinions on anything I've got an opinion on. My pay is a little below average for the industry, but that's a trade-off I'm willing to make for the other stuff. In short, I'm not being exploited. I think I'm getting a good deal, so I don't have any reason to expect a union to make my life better.
(As an aside, we're hiring for my group's manager, so if the above sounds impossible, we might have a place for you.)
If you're being forced to work 10+ hour days, are always on-call, or are otherwise being mistreated, I suggest you think long and hard about whether the salary is worth it. If you're young and single, maybe it is. I worked long hours and tolerated a lot of crap at my first (non-IT) job because I needed the money. I suspect most of the people doing the same in IT are in the same boat. Older, more experienced people are in a better position to find better working conditions. There is so much turnover in the IT industry, anybody who's qualified can always find something else if they don't like their current job.
This is who we want one heartbeat away from the presidency? With the relevant heartbeat being that of a 72-year-old, multiple cancer victim?
I knew McCain would do anything to get elected, but I didn't think he was completely unhinged. I guess that explains why he hired the same goons who ran the smears against him in South Carolina. In the immortal words of Penny Arcade: batshit fucking loco.
At least in the US, grocery checkout staff are far from the bottom of the labor market. I used to think it had to be the lowest job imaginable, but then there was a major strike of grocery workers in Southern California a few years ago. There was a lot of discussion in the newpapers about their wages, benefits, etc. and it turns out they make decent wages (1.5x to 2x minimum wage) and have good benefits -- they were mostly striking over the details of health insurance. So I was mystified why they were striking, since it seemed like they were getting a fair deal for unskilled work.
But then the strike dragged on long enough that the stores brought in scabs. It changed my opinion of grocery workers immediately. The scabs were awful -- they didn't know any of the codes for the fruit, so it took them a minute to look up each code. They couldn't bag the groceries properly. They were twice as slow, etc.
And in the UK, my experience was that the grocery workers were much more competent than in the US. Generally more personable and helpful, like noticing if a package was damaged or letting me know if there was a special two-for-one price.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me share with you a special URL:
http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
Before you buy anything from Apple, check this URL. It will save you much heartache.
I've worked on projects much larger than 10k loc, in vim. Without syntax highlighting, completion, folding, etc. Of course vim can do all those things, I just don't use them. I mostly use 4-8 terminals with a couple dedicated to compiling and/or deploying webapps, and editing files in the rest.
The point is: different tools work for different people. Just because you like one set of tools doesn't mean that set of tools is objectively better, or is going to be good for any particular person.
Bullshit. The negatives in Polaroid film are silver-halide emulsions just like any standard film. They have the same grain limitations that other films do. A few seconds of googling turned this up:
http://polaroids.theskeltons.org/film3.htm
Sorry, I get it. Everybody has a point of view. And, in this example, the Chinese point of view is that Taiwan is a renegade province of China. And you can make a map that expresses this point of view -- I'm sure they are hanging on walls throughout China.
But you can also make a neutral map that expresses reality. In this map, Taiwan would be its own country. It's an objective fact that Taiwan is a self-governing country, and no amount of Chinese objection (or other countries' diplomatic niceties, for that matter) changes that.
I believe that every thorny geopolitical problem, from Cyprus, to the Palestinian territories, to Kashmir can be neutrally and objectively represented on a map. Of course many people will produce maps to promote their desired outcome of those conflicts, but that doesn't mean that every map expresses a point of view. It means that maps, unlike those other forms of expression, can be neutral.
I would label it Taiwan. It is an objective fact that there is an independent government there. Just because someone else doesn't like a fact, doesn't make it go away.
Sorry, but no. The map can be neutral. It's the people with a point of view.
It looks like OpenJDK now runs on MacOSX:
http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/static/soylatte/
Can you really blame them for not believing that "normal" Britons go around looking at planes on military bases and keeping track of the call letters in their little books? While on vacation to Greece?
I certainly think the British government should have applied more pressure to get them out of jail sooner. But you have to admit their behavior was suspicious.
Anything with words in can be accused of having racist and/or sexist biases. Just for one extreme fictional example, imagine something like this: http://www.snopes.com/humor/question/mathtest.asp -- but it doesn't have to be ridiculous like that. It could just be the race and sex composition of the smiling faces on the cover.
Anything written by people can be tainted by other works by those people, or by private comments they have made. Anything published by a company can be tainted by other books they've published, how they treat their employees, where they get their supplies, etc.
So I can understand why you think math isn't polarizing, but in a poisoned political environment like California, anything can be politicized.
Just as in ancient times, librarians are working on these problems.
Failing hard drives are only a problem if you foolishly store data on only one drive, or on only one system. Most of the people I know store multiple copies locally, and as many copies remotely as they can. For example, the system I work with every day has data at three main sites: one in my library's server room, one in another place on campus, and a third in another part of the state. Each of these sites has redundant drives, tape backups, etc.
Formats that nobody can read is a larger problem, but mainly for access systems (as opposed to preservation systems). The images most people can use are low res, low quality and in formats that change every few years. When the format changes, you throw them away. The images that are stored long-term are in lossless, open, well-documented formats, like TIFF and PDF.
Accidental deletes can be a problem, depending on who has access to what data. Multiple sites help if there are problems. Rigorous checking of the files periodically (like checking the md5sums), helps find problems too.
There are a lot of people thinking very hard about how to make this stuff last as long as possible. Libraries typically don't have huge budgets, and digitizing and preserving materials is very costly compared to what we usually do. So there's a lot of focus on doing things right the first time, learning from other people's mistakes, etc.
We've all seen that "fixing the spam problem is impossible" form letter. In fact, I think I've even posted it here on slashdot and probably on usenet back in the day.
But I think parent is basically correct: the only practical way to end spam is to make it unprofitable. Ending the rewards for spamming is truly impossible. Criminalizing it is possible, but ineffective. Filtering hides the problem but doesn't fix it. Technical solutions will at best result in an arms race, because there is so much money at stake. Increasing the cost of sending spam is the only way.
The the problem is figuring out how to make spammers pay without destroying email as a communications tool in the process.
Having every email cost a cent (given to the recipient) will go a long way. Micropayments won't be needed because the transactions are already intermediated by ISPs, so they can handle the payment differences amongst themselves in bulk, and then charge their customers accordingly.
Most senders of email will send and receive roughly the same amount of email, so they will not be affected much. They will get a quota from their ISPs, and if they send a lot more than they receive, they will have to pay for it. In an ideal world, people would be cut off after they hit their quota, so if they were zombied, they wouldn't rack up thousands of dollars in email sending fees. I would hope that getting cut off from sending email for the rest of the month would help motivate people to clean up their PCs, too.
Bulk emailers (newsletters, confirmation emails, etc.) will need a separate system. Some of them can simply pay for it (I'm sure Amazon can simply charge you an extra five cents to pay for the confirmation emails they send you). Maybe others can require return confirmation, or even pre-confirmation. If they don't get an email from you, you don't get emailed your newsletter, etc.
let's call it phoenix, so it can rise from the ashes of firefox?
I switched from a completely non-technical position to a being programmer. Though it took me about two years and several small steps. Basically, I kept learning relevant skills, and when there were gaps (because of people quitting, or new stuff that I found that needed doing), I was there and able to do the work. My first transition was from general office work to being the "computer guy" at a small company. I got this job because I knew the most about Linux, so when the old computer guy left, I was the most qualified. I got another job doing documentation and tech support for a small project. I taught myself enough Perl to do some simple CGIs, and found some simple apps that I could do. This got me noticed and officially licensed to do some programming in addition to my other duties. Then I took some night classes in Java and got promoted to a full-time developer. Since you already know how to code, I'd suggest finding people in your company who need help. I knew a lot of people who were doing really mind-numbing repetitive work in Excel or by hand to do statistics or reports. So I wrote some Perl scripts to automate some of that, or setup Excel files better to automate the statistics generation. I found it really helpful to have people who would vouch for me along the lines of "I used to spend hours doing that, and he wrote a program that would do it in 5 minutes". That obviously helps a lot more if you can move to a developer position in your company.
99% of people will be fine with just knowing that someone doesn't work the company any more. The HR people need to know he's fired, because it might affect final pay, benefits, etc. Very few people need to know why someone was fired. And there's a big difference between saying "Joe was fired" and "Joe was fired for not following our reimbursement regulations, so don't forget to follow the rules" and "Joe was fired because he couldn't follow our reimbursement regulations about alcohol". That's where the malice test comes in.
I think employees suing their employers is a special case, because the employer has a lot of private info on the employee. So they can take things out of context and ruin somebody's reputation, make it hard for them to get another job, etc.
I'm not sure libel is the best way to handle this problem. But there need to be limits on what employers can say about their employees and former employees because the company is in a position to abuse the private info they have.
As a developer, I find my self doing this far more than I'd like. I've used proxies that dump headers and firefox extensions to view the headers and all that. But they all screw up other stuff or fail to work sometimes. So there's something really nice about $ telnet server 80 Connected to server. Escape character is '^]' HEAD /foo/bar?baz=quux HTTP/1.0
etc.
What I would really like to see is movie theaters and the like being able to broadcast a signal that would automatically force phones into silent mode. Because I really don't care if the guy on the other side of the theater is texting or talking. But the ringing and beeping carries through the whole theater. I would find this a useful service, too, since I sometimes forget to put my phone in silent mode. Or, more often, forget to take it out of silent mode when the movie's over and miss a call because I don't hear it. This seems like a much more reasonable balance to me. Considerate people can still take important calls discreetly. Assholes who talk and annoy people around them (whether a phone is involved or not) should be booted.
The original looks bad because it's a low-res version, and the altered version looks better because it's a hi-res version from AP. The bad photoshopping is how completely synthetic the flag looks. It doesn't even look passably real. A decent photoshop would at least use a real picture of a flag with similar lighting to the original photo, so the contrast between the subject and background is so jarring it's obviously been altered.
Assuming your metadata isn't too complicated (and since you're using CSV, I'm assuming it isn't), it should be very simple to convert it to MARC using MARC4J. I'm not sure if there are similar libraries for Perl or other languages.
In fact, I'd be happy to help you with this, since it's pretty ridiculous to be charging for such a simple service. You can email me at escowles [at] ucsd.edu.
-Esme
The vast majority of the mainstream media does not have a strong ideological bias. Fox News would be the major exception to this. But all of the mainstream media (including Fox) have a corporate bias -- they are owned and controlled by media and industrial conglomerates who don't want bad press. They want ratings so they can make money from their customers (advertisers), and they don't want to offend their advertisers. So content-free he-said/she-said stories are ideal. They cost very little to produce, provide the illusion of fair and thoughtful coverage, and are perfect for easily producing sensationalist teasers and headlines (just take the most extreme claim by one side, twist it till it screams, and then rephrase it as a question: "Is Barack Obama a Socialist?"). Political stories are the best for this, since there are well-defined teams that can be easily riled up, and there is a constant stream of ridiculous accusations flying around during the now-never-ending campaign season. Sex and violence are close runners-up, since titillation, outrage and fear are also good motivators to get people to watch. So I think these media coverage statistics can be easily explained by the fact that Obama's campaign was largely about his biography and his agenda, and McCain's campaign was mostly accusations about Obama's biography and agenda. This resulted in a lot of easy (and easily sensationalized) stories about Obama. Add to this the difference in enthusiasm between Obama's supporters and McCain's, and the actual newsworthiness of his candidacy, and it shouldn't be surprising that he got more coverage.
Modern phones have programmable phonebooks built in. It would be very easy to have something like this added to the phone options: if the number isn't in my phonebook, don't ring.
Other than being a well-known fake, the biggest problem with this analogy is that it leaves out the income of each of the men. If the tenth man is making as much money as the other nine put together, then paying 60% of the tab is about as affordable for him as what the other people are paying (given that basic necessities, etc. are a smaller share of his income).
So while it seems unfair that the richest person should pay such a large share, in fact the burden is being shared pretty fairly. Progressive taxation, and estate taxes, are designed to share the tax burden and prevent extreme concentrations of wealth. Concentration of wealth was a big factor in creating the Great Depression, and a large part of the New Deal was to reverse the trend and lessen its effects. We have gotten back close to the same concentration of wealth as the 1920's, and I hope the correction is less devastating this time.
-Esme
There was a unionization drive for IT at my university not so long ago. I wasn't allowed to vote in the election because I was a technically a temp worker at the time, but I would definitely have voted "no".
I've got great working conditions: great benefits, good career development (books, classes, conferences, etc. paid for), good hours (nominally 9-5, but with flexibility for me to pick up my kids, etc.), and very good working conditions (telecommute full-time from another state, at the time of the vote I was telecommuting from another country). I'm treated with respect and encouraged to voice my opinions on anything I've got an opinion on. My pay is a little below average for the industry, but that's a trade-off I'm willing to make for the other stuff. In short, I'm not being exploited. I think I'm getting a good deal, so I don't have any reason to expect a union to make my life better.
(As an aside, we're hiring for my group's manager, so if the above sounds impossible, we might have a place for you.)
If you're being forced to work 10+ hour days, are always on-call, or are otherwise being mistreated, I suggest you think long and hard about whether the salary is worth it. If you're young and single, maybe it is. I worked long hours and tolerated a lot of crap at my first (non-IT) job because I needed the money. I suspect most of the people doing the same in IT are in the same boat. Older, more experienced people are in a better position to find better working conditions. There is so much turnover in the IT industry, anybody who's qualified can always find something else if they don't like their current job.
-Esme
The most obvious pander since Ferraro.
Zero foreign-policy experience.
Already scandal-tainted.
This is who we want one heartbeat away from the presidency? With the relevant heartbeat being that of a 72-year-old, multiple cancer victim?
I knew McCain would do anything to get elected, but I didn't think he was completely unhinged. I guess that explains why he hired the same goons who ran the smears against him in South Carolina. In the immortal words of Penny Arcade: batshit fucking loco.
-Esme
At least in the US, grocery checkout staff are far from the bottom of the labor market. I used to think it had to be the lowest job imaginable, but then there was a major strike of grocery workers in Southern California a few years ago. There was a lot of discussion in the newpapers about their wages, benefits, etc. and it turns out they make decent wages (1.5x to 2x minimum wage) and have good benefits -- they were mostly striking over the details of health insurance. So I was mystified why they were striking, since it seemed like they were getting a fair deal for unskilled work.
But then the strike dragged on long enough that the stores brought in scabs. It changed my opinion of grocery workers immediately. The scabs were awful -- they didn't know any of the codes for the fruit, so it took them a minute to look up each code. They couldn't bag the groceries properly. They were twice as slow, etc.
And in the UK, my experience was that the grocery workers were much more competent than in the US. Generally more personable and helpful, like noticing if a package was damaged or letting me know if there was a special two-for-one price.
-Esme