Even though it is much safer to live in Finland than in Estonia, that safety comes at the price of stiffling innovation and keeping a thight grip on the population that the state routinely quiets down.
Finland also has an immigration law (which is actually called Aliens' Act) that practically guarantees that none of the refugees will ever find work and none of the legal immigrants will ever stand a fair chance of settling down and acquiring citizenship.
Meanwhile, even though Estonia has very strict immigration laws, including draconian immigration quotas, it remains a country that is fairly open-minded, where individual freedom is ages ahead of Finland and where people are as easy-going as a perfect blonde on Pärnu beach.
Disclaimer: I am not Estonian. However, I have previously worked for an Estonian company and been to Estonia and Latvia quite often and I still have many good friends there. I also speak decent Estonian, fluent Finnish and bits of Latvian and Lithuanian.
Language
Estonian is not an Indo-European language; it has very little in common with e.g. English, German, French, etc. Instead, it is a Fenno-Ugric language that is very close to Finnish and a distant cousin to Hungarian.
Meanwhile, Latvian and Lithuanian are very much Indo-Europeans and the oldest living languages of the tree. They feature words that come from as far as India's Sanscript and also have words in common with every branch of the Indo-european family. As such, they share a lot with Slavic (Russian, Polish, Czech, etc.) and Germanic (Dutch, Scandinavian) languages. While my knowledge of Latvian is extremely limitted, I find bits of German, Swedish, Russian and even French in both the vocabulary and grammar. Yet, some of the words sounds like nothing else in the other languages and would probably date back to Proto-European languages or Sanscript.
History
The Baltics have been under the domination of just about every major European power throughout history: Russia, Danemark, Sweden, Germany, Poland. As such, people's roots, particularly in Estonia, are quite diverse. As a former collegue was commenting: "What does it mean to be Estonian? Our ancestors are either Polish, Danish, Finnish, Swedish or God knows what. Few of us have actually got Fenno-Ugric blood all the way back; the only thing we have in common, is that we all speak Estonian."
The two most important phases of foreign dominations were the Hanseatic League and the Soviet Union. The first was Germany's answer to Sweden's conquest of Finland, Carelia, Ingria and Northern Russia in an attempt to control trade routes around the Baltic rim, while the later was the result of sham elections held during the Soviet force invasion near the end of the World War II.
The Soviet era forever altered the ethnic background of Estonia and especially Latvia, resulting in a large influx of Russians (plus some Ukrainians and Bielorussians) from poor rural areas being relocated there as labour force and military personel. Nowadays, Estonia's population counts about 30% of Russian-speaking former Soviet expats, while Latvia has over 40% of them. Lithuania was spared from this forced colonization, having maintained an 80% purely Lithuanian ethnic composition.
Technology in the Baltics
During the Soviet era, the three Baltic states became USSR's key engineering center. Estonia got a top-notch Cybernetics Institute that produced some of USSR's most top-secret military electronics, in the Tallinn suburb of Mustamae, while Latvia produced the railway equipement and home appliances for a large part of USSR. (I am unfortunately not familiar with what role Lithuania played - can someone fill in these blanks?)
During the Glasnost introduced by Gorbachev in the 80s, that engineering know-how started being applied to non-military needs, which produced, among other things, audiophile and video equipment such as those made by the company Estonia. Having personally heard their pristine sound, I can say that they compare extremely well to those pricey Scandinavian audiophile speakers and amplifiers. Latvia also had a similar brand, whose name I forgot, whose success was less noticable.
How Estonia became an Internet and PKI Mecca
While the Baltics had been a somewhat cozy travel destination famous for its white sandy beaches and spas (before and during the Soviet era), its infrastructure started falling appart during the Glasnost. As such, once the 3 countries regained their independance in the early 90s, rebuilding them was among the top priorities.
The phone network dated from the early part of the century and hardly reached rural areas. It was of course all analog. Scandinavian telephone compan
Its nearest cousin is Finnish. Finns and Estonians can understand each other, more or less, the same way e.g. spaniards can understand portuguese or swedes can understand norse.
An Estonian high school teacher earns about 5000eek/month, while IT workers get about 10,000eek/month and managers about 15,000eek/month. Your milage might vary.
His story goes like this: poor Latino programmer wanting a job at Microsoft but without a chance of landing one spots this thing called Linux and decides to proove his mettle by coding for that. Fast forward a few years later and he's doing an OSS clone of.Net and getting invited by said Microsoft to discuss compatibility issues. What if Microsoft had real reasons for licensing UNIX?
While Miguel seems to have developped into a fine programmer, I cannot help but feel very uneasy about someone whose dream once was to work for Microsoft actually leading one of the two main desktop efforts on Linux. Already, the gconf system reaks of Windows register...
IANAL, but I have this textbook concerning Finnish business law, which is written as a series of FAQ meant to be easily understood by small business owners and self-employed people. One point specifically deals with non-compete agreements:
The total duration cannot ever exceed 1 year, under any circumstance.
If the duration is 1 month or less, the employee is not entitled to any compensation.
If the duration exceeds 1 month, the employer must continue paying the full salary and benefits until the non-compete agreement has expired.
IIRC other EU countries deal with this in a similar way.
Is the "disarm them with honnesty" approach a job killer? It is if you need to pay the bills, but if you are not in any rush to get work (house and car already paid for, etc.), then it will save you and the candidate employer a lot of wasted time and frustrations:
The first two points will weed you out of a company that insits upon deadlines and schedules, with managers that presume highly of their abilities to budget and schedule everything oh-so brilliantly.
The last two points are guaranteed to prevent you from getting jobs at Microsoft-dependand shops, or anywhere that is stuck in vendor-lock in general, since they are essentially building on proprietary bases.
This opens the larger and somewhat off-topic debate: True freedom only exists when you are no longer dependant upon money.
You'll surely notice that only CEOs or politicians can have a claim at true freedom: their salary is high enough that if they reach a "mutual disagreement" with the organization, they can afford to just hand over their resignation, take a few months of vacation and reappear at the helm of another organization 6 months later.
Meanwhile, most mere mortals actually need a job to make ends meet and are therefore forced into making decisions that go against their moral principles, such as accepting a job doing somehting they hate.
The obvious conclusion is that since their is no freedom without financial independance, there is also no democracy except among truely free men who can afford the consequences of their decisions.
In most western countries, it no longer is legal to do that. You have a right to listen to the CD, but not copy its content to wherever else. I never said that the RIAA and its European equivalent are right about this, quite the contrary, but the legal trend is that Europe is adopting the American model on this one, despite the tradition of fair rights that we had so far enjoyed in Europe.
Nowadays, not only do you pay a special tax on tapes and blank CDs, you also pay one on hard-disks purchased as separate parts, on the assumption that any storage media will be used to make copies of someone's copyrighted material. Adding insult to injury, after you have indeed ripped your legally purchased CDs, as suspected by that taxation scheme, you still get arrested for having had mp3s on your hard-disk, without having separately licensed them.
First off, I would look into these files called "mp3s" people seem to be filling up a lot of disk space with them these days.
[sarcasm]Oh, you mean those files that sent you to jail after the RIAA came knocking on your door?[/sarcasm]
No, seriously, I have a few people's own demos as mp3. For everything else, a nice CD collection and incoming Shoutcast streams via broadband give me all the music I need.
Did you know that computers are fast enough to play movies now? That's right you can actually watch movies on your computer. (Or if you're me, your handheld:)
That's probably why I have an iMac. Without it, I wouldn't have seen the Enterprise series...
Every heard of digital cameras?
I use a scratch partition mounted via network to collect what mine spits and, after editing, the album/movie goes to CD.
Did you know you can buy a scanner and keep documents in your computer? No more endless piles of dead trees!
That's probably why I refuse to use regular surface mail to send documents, nowadays; I scan everything and e-mail it as attachments, unless they absolutely insist that it won't do.
[user@localhost user]$ du -s Mail
254932 Mail
Clearing old mail off your $inbox would do you good.
Play any modern games? I didn't think so.
Ever heard about the demo scene? I didn't think so.
Of course, if you're happy with your 2GB HDDs and your 640KB of RAM,
More like, 2Gb drive and between 256Mb - 1Gb of RAM, on average. 2Gb is all the storage I need for the applications. Home directories are mounted from a fileserver, which has a 4.5 drive mounted as/home that is available thru Samba.
Back in the 2GB days, do you remember how much HDDs cost? You can by 2 drives today for those prices and use one as backup.
That would be pure waste.
I would probably end up like the other poster who replied to my post said: 40Gb drive of which only an 8Gb partition is used - either because the BIOS on some hardware (yep, I heard about "flashing the BIOS", but Compaq apparently has not) cannot handle more than a few gigs, or more often because the applications I use easily fit the 2Gb constraint of workstations and/home is mounted via Samba.
modern drives are pretty reliable, and highly compatible with each other
I wanna have some of what he's smoking, quick!
Seriously, I have IDE and SCSI drives that are about 10 years old (capacity is obviously small - in the 200 - 500mb range) and have almost no bad sectors; they still do a reliable job in routers and other boxes that don't require a lot of storage. Meanwhile, newer drives of 2Gb or larger regularly require replacements. Then, there's the problem of recent drive capacities being too large for the BIOSes of my "deprecated" computers, not to mention SCSI connector standards that change more often than the MTV Top 10.
The real problem, for an end-user, though, is the excessively generous storage capacities; as Cringely once pointed out, unless you are a graphic artist, your personal data probably fits well within 500Mb of storage. Why the hell is it that the smallest drives I can purchase nowadays are around 30Gb (120Gb for SCSI), at a time when my data storage needs still have not exceeded that 500Mb per user quota? And, no, my workstations do not suddenly have a use for larger drives either.
One cannot help but notice how manufacturer warranties reflect the lower quality, as well. Where we used to have 5 year warranties (which, in practice, meant that the drive actually performs well for about 10 years), current offerings are guaranteed for 1 year and last exactly that. There's been several recent cases e.g. with IBM's glass drives, where a replacement is required within 6 months from purchase.
I don't know about you, but I have better things to do than constantly wasting money on purchasing replacement drives and time on reinstalling everything on the new drive, only to find out that the BIOS cannot use such large drives, and cursing that I had to purchase a drive whose capacity is exactly 100 times what I can use.
Message to drive manufacturers: Gimme reliable and quiet 2 - 4Gb drives, using the good old 50-pin connectors in both IDE and SCSI flavours, but providing all the modern refinements of Ultra DMA100, etc. and guaranteed for 5 years or more. Make them affordable too. We don't want any more stinky throw-away media storage, thanks you.
Given that Gnome 2.2 uses UTF-8 by default, I wonder why these ISO-8859-1/9/15 fonts were not merged into a UTF-8 skeleton to which e.g. Cyrillic, Hellenic and missing Latin glyphs could be added? Then, we would really have a good starting point for what could become a GOOD default system font, not just in Gnome but in XFree86 too.
Right now, the default Adobe fonts that ship with XFree86 are pretty crap! Granted the URW fonts released thru the Gimp site could be good as well and maybe should replace the tired old Adobe fonts. In any case, I think that, from now on, XFree86 should ship with only 3 fonts by default: serif, sans, mono - all in UTF-8.
Whether the Type1 URW fonts or these new Bitstream fonts should get that prestigious role remains an open issue, but in any case, the fonts should cover as much of UTF-8 as possible and at least all of the following: Arabic, CJK (simplified forms only), Cyrillic, Latin, Hellenic, Judaic. Once we have that, we have default UTF-8 base fonts equal in strenght to Arial/Times New Roman/Courrier New, which any application can expect to find. This would at least solve the problems experienced by Opera and OpenOffice, for selecting sensible default fonts.
Really, it should be. If someone claims to be a webmaster, but consistantly checks their work ONLY in IE, they have earned the right to be shot dead. I really, honnestly mean it. Death to all self-proclaimed webmasters who don't know anything else than IE and cannot be bothered with W3C standards!
I don't mind the banner, honnestly; I really don't. What I mind is a company that obviously lacks the sales skills to attract customers that will give me ads that are actually targetted for ME, in my language!
While I have NOT filled every field in the Advertising section, the fact that I selected "country: Finland" and "birth: 1970-1979" should be enough of a clue that I do NOT want any fucking ads from the American-latino dating agency Migente popping at me continuously!
Anna miulle suomenkielisiä mainoksia tai sitten mee pois, vitun norjalaishölmö!
Do CTRL-Q in Mozilla and, the next time you return, all your tabs are gone; so much for the oh-so-great tabs. Because of dumb oversights like this, Galeon and Mozilla aren't worth a hoot in real life, while Opera had already figured out the right way to do tabs, ages before Mozilla gave their first try at it.
That, my friend, is the difference between a well-matured commercial product and an OSS hobbyist's project that gets there 5 years afterwards and still lacks the polish that real-life, non-hacker end-users need.
Whether it's SCSI drives that fail within 1 year of purchase (compared to previous lifetime, then 5 years warranty), RAM that becomes corrupt after 6 months of usage (compared to old 30-pin SIMMS that still work flawlessly), etc. the quality of computer parts has going down, overall.
Unfortunately, this trend is intentional: What incentive would anyone have to buy a new PC or new parts, if they all were made to last forever? Obviously, there would be zero incentive. That's why the PC industry purposely make components that are less and less reliable, just to keep people on buying something new every once in a while.
Top customer saying our CEO is a dick, but I'm Ace
on
Good Job Experiences?
·
· Score: 1
Last week, the company's main foreign customer, after having complained that our CEO evidently is a clueless dick that cannot accomplish anything (which is quite accurate), went on to comment that I'm the most competent Key Account Manager and CTO he's ever done business with.
As if this wasn't enough, he insisted that, if I ever started a competing company, he would gladly stop buying from my current employer and take his business my way, even going as far as offering to fund my startup, since he already knows that I can deliver the goods, while our CEO never gave him satisfaction even though his company is our main customer.
This was VERY obvious ass-kissing with hopes of seeing me agree to undercut my current employer by starting a competing company, but still... On a day like this, I cannot help but wanna go into town, grab a few whores and party all night! =)
PS: Other key customers have also repeatedly expressed their satisfaction in dealing with me as their Account Manager, all while venting their frustration at how clueless our CEO appears to be.
PGI is nice and everything, but does not use debconf,
And how the hell is debconf supposed to help me partition a hard disk or auto-detect hardware? "dpkg-reconfigure/dev/hda" and "dpkg-reconfigure/dev/eth0" are not supported options. Debconf is a package configurator, not an installer. Big difference. Meanwhile, PGI is what a proper installer should be.
I recall a friend telling me, when we passed thru it, that there used to be a fairly huge industrial area nearby, until the 80's. Once the Soviet Union fell and the factories closed, they boarded up the place with aluminium siding and demolished the building at the entrance in 1989. The station itself was built on a bridge running over one of Moscow's rivers (I forgot which one). At one point, someone decided to call the long demolished site "cleared for future reconstruction work" and reopening was targetted for 2002. Perhaps someone in Moscow can update us?
The catch is (if you ignore the current burst allowing broad phone and e-mail tapping, in the name of anti-terrorism war), nobody can record anyone else without their prior consent, in most countries. The only exception is the police, where they have to obtain a warrant
Even then, depending on the jusrisdiction, they may postpone informing the subject of tapping operations, anywhere between 6 months after the end of the operation, to never at all; some countries impose an obligation to the police to eventually inform someone that his communications were being tapped, other countries don't and even allow the police to build whole cases on someone, Stasi-style, without anyone ever being told... until it is too late and they are in court.
In a nutshell, the police can videotape your arrest and do as they please with that, but you are not allowed to videotape their search of your house or to record a conversation with any public employee, in most countries.
That old statement about those prefering safety over freedom not being worthy of either comes to mind. I prefer freedom to fight police or politicians with equal tools, than the false security that George DoubleSnort Bush and his boys might be doing the right thing - which, btw, they are not: forget Bin Laden and Sadam! Kill Dubya and save the whole world from the blatant takover of the planet by idiots like Fiorina, Gates and Walton and their lobbying drones in Washignton!
While I really like GAIM for its all-in-one approach to messenging protocols, the authors deserve a kick in the balls for having windows that constantly raise to the front, every time someone sends you a message. The result is, you are typing an e-mail or programming and, all of a sudden, what you typed ends up in the wrong window, simply because GAIM is receiving an incoming message for you. Bad, Bad, Bad GAIM..
People coding window managers should also wake up to the fact that not everyone wants the latest application someone started to pop in their face, while they are returning to another window during the application startup. e.g. If I start OpenOffice and I know for fact that this piece of bloatware needs 5 minutes before the main window comes to screen, so I go back to typing e-mails until the application has loaded, I do not want frigging OpenOffice popping up and assuming thta what I was in the middle of typing was meant for its Untitled 1 document. As such, Xlib and other OSes' GUI libs should completely remove the ability for an application to request that one of its windows be raised and brought to the foreground since, anyhow, window mangement is the responsibility of... window managers.
Slashdot Mirror
Finland also has an immigration law (which is actually called Aliens' Act) that practically guarantees that none of the refugees will ever find work and none of the legal immigrants will ever stand a fair chance of settling down and acquiring citizenship.
Meanwhile, even though Estonia has very strict immigration laws, including draconian immigration quotas, it remains a country that is fairly open-minded, where individual freedom is ages ahead of Finland and where people are as easy-going as a perfect blonde on Pärnu beach.
Yes, that's the one I was thinking about. Aitäh! :)
Disclaimer: I am not Estonian. However, I have previously worked for an Estonian company and been to Estonia and Latvia quite often and I still have many good friends there. I also speak decent Estonian, fluent Finnish and bits of Latvian and Lithuanian.
Language
Estonian is not an Indo-European language; it has very little in common with e.g. English, German, French, etc. Instead, it is a Fenno-Ugric language that is very close to Finnish and a distant cousin to Hungarian.
Meanwhile, Latvian and Lithuanian are very much Indo-Europeans and the oldest living languages of the tree. They feature words that come from as far as India's Sanscript and also have words in common with every branch of the Indo-european family. As such, they share a lot with Slavic (Russian, Polish, Czech, etc.) and Germanic (Dutch, Scandinavian) languages. While my knowledge of Latvian is extremely limitted, I find bits of German, Swedish, Russian and even French in both the vocabulary and grammar. Yet, some of the words sounds like nothing else in the other languages and would probably date back to Proto-European languages or Sanscript.
History
The Baltics have been under the domination of just about every major European power throughout history: Russia, Danemark, Sweden, Germany, Poland. As such, people's roots, particularly in Estonia, are quite diverse. As a former collegue was commenting: "What does it mean to be Estonian? Our ancestors are either Polish, Danish, Finnish, Swedish or God knows what. Few of us have actually got Fenno-Ugric blood all the way back; the only thing we have in common, is that we all speak Estonian."
The two most important phases of foreign dominations were the Hanseatic League and the Soviet Union. The first was Germany's answer to Sweden's conquest of Finland, Carelia, Ingria and Northern Russia in an attempt to control trade routes around the Baltic rim, while the later was the result of sham elections held during the Soviet force invasion near the end of the World War II.
The Soviet era forever altered the ethnic background of Estonia and especially Latvia, resulting in a large influx of Russians (plus some Ukrainians and Bielorussians) from poor rural areas being relocated there as labour force and military personel. Nowadays, Estonia's population counts about 30% of Russian-speaking former Soviet expats, while Latvia has over 40% of them. Lithuania was spared from this forced colonization, having maintained an 80% purely Lithuanian ethnic composition.
Technology in the Baltics
During the Soviet era, the three Baltic states became USSR's key engineering center. Estonia got a top-notch Cybernetics Institute that produced some of USSR's most top-secret military electronics, in the Tallinn suburb of Mustamae, while Latvia produced the railway equipement and home appliances for a large part of USSR. (I am unfortunately not familiar with what role Lithuania played - can someone fill in these blanks?)
During the Glasnost introduced by Gorbachev in the 80s, that engineering know-how started being applied to non-military needs, which produced, among other things, audiophile and video equipment such as those made by the company Estonia. Having personally heard their pristine sound, I can say that they compare extremely well to those pricey Scandinavian audiophile speakers and amplifiers. Latvia also had a similar brand, whose name I forgot, whose success was less noticable.
How Estonia became an Internet and PKI Mecca
While the Baltics had been a somewhat cozy travel destination famous for its white sandy beaches and spas (before and during the Soviet era), its infrastructure started falling appart during the Glasnost. As such, once the 3 countries regained their independance in the early 90s, rebuilding them was among the top priorities.
The phone network dated from the early part of the century and hardly reached rural areas. It was of course all analog. Scandinavian telephone compan
Its nearest cousin is Finnish. Finns and Estonians can understand each other, more or less, the same way e.g. spaniards can understand portuguese or swedes can understand norse.
An Estonian high school teacher earns about 5000eek/month, while IT workers get about 10,000eek/month and managers about 15,000eek/month. Your milage might vary.
While Miguel seems to have developped into a fine programmer, I cannot help but feel very uneasy about someone whose dream once was to work for Microsoft actually leading one of the two main desktop efforts on Linux. Already, the gconf system reaks of Windows register...
IANAL, but I have this textbook concerning Finnish business law, which is written as a series of FAQ meant to be easily understood by small business owners and self-employed people. One point specifically deals with non-compete agreements:
- The total duration cannot ever exceed 1 year, under any circumstance.
- If the duration is 1 month or less, the employee is not entitled to any compensation.
- If the duration exceeds 1 month, the employer must continue paying the full salary and benefits until the non-compete agreement has expired.
IIRC other EU countries deal with this in a similar way.Florida is a fucked-up state. News at 9/11.
- The first two points will weed you out of a company that insits upon deadlines and schedules, with managers that presume highly of their abilities to budget and schedule everything oh-so brilliantly.
-
The last two points are guaranteed to prevent you from getting jobs at Microsoft-dependand shops, or anywhere that is stuck in vendor-lock in general, since they are essentially building on proprietary bases.
This opens the larger and somewhat off-topic debate: True freedom only exists when you are no longer dependant upon money.You'll surely notice that only CEOs or politicians can have a claim at true freedom: their salary is high enough that if they reach a "mutual disagreement" with the organization, they can afford to just hand over their resignation, take a few months of vacation and reappear at the helm of another organization 6 months later.
Meanwhile, most mere mortals actually need a job to make ends meet and are therefore forced into making decisions that go against their moral principles, such as accepting a job doing somehting they hate.
The obvious conclusion is that since their is no freedom without financial independance, there is also no democracy except among truely free men who can afford the consequences of their decisions.
Nowadays, not only do you pay a special tax on tapes and blank CDs, you also pay one on hard-disks purchased as separate parts, on the assumption that any storage media will be used to make copies of someone's copyrighted material. Adding insult to injury, after you have indeed ripped your legally purchased CDs, as suspected by that taxation scheme, you still get arrested for having had mp3s on your hard-disk, without having separately licensed them.
[sarcasm]Oh, you mean those files that sent you to jail after the RIAA came knocking on your door?[/sarcasm]
No, seriously, I have a few people's own demos as mp3. For everything else, a nice CD collection and incoming Shoutcast streams via broadband give me all the music I need.
That's probably why I have an iMac. Without it, I wouldn't have seen the Enterprise series...
I use a scratch partition mounted via network to collect what mine spits and, after editing, the album/movie goes to CD.
That's probably why I refuse to use regular surface mail to send documents, nowadays; I scan everything and e-mail it as attachments, unless they absolutely insist that it won't do.
Clearing old mail off your $inbox would do you good.
Ever heard about the demo scene? I didn't think so.
More like, 2Gb drive and between 256Mb - 1Gb of RAM, on average. 2Gb is all the storage I need for the applications. Home directories are mounted from a fileserver, which has a 4.5 drive mounted as /home that is available thru Samba.
That would be pure waste.
I would probably end up like the other poster who replied to my post said: 40Gb drive of which only an 8Gb partition is used - either because the BIOS on some hardware (yep, I heard about "flashing the BIOS", but Compaq apparently has not) cannot handle more than a few gigs, or more often because the applications I use easily fit the 2Gb constraint of workstations and /home is mounted via Samba.
Seriously, I have IDE and SCSI drives that are about 10 years old (capacity is obviously small - in the 200 - 500mb range) and have almost no bad sectors; they still do a reliable job in routers and other boxes that don't require a lot of storage. Meanwhile, newer drives of 2Gb or larger regularly require replacements. Then, there's the problem of recent drive capacities being too large for the BIOSes of my "deprecated" computers, not to mention SCSI connector standards that change more often than the MTV Top 10.
The real problem, for an end-user, though, is the excessively generous storage capacities; as Cringely once pointed out, unless you are a graphic artist, your personal data probably fits well within 500Mb of storage. Why the hell is it that the smallest drives I can purchase nowadays are around 30Gb (120Gb for SCSI), at a time when my data storage needs still have not exceeded that 500Mb per user quota? And, no, my workstations do not suddenly have a use for larger drives either.
One cannot help but notice how manufacturer warranties reflect the lower quality, as well. Where we used to have 5 year warranties (which, in practice, meant that the drive actually performs well for about 10 years), current offerings are guaranteed for 1 year and last exactly that. There's been several recent cases e.g. with IBM's glass drives, where a replacement is required within 6 months from purchase.
I don't know about you, but I have better things to do than constantly wasting money on purchasing replacement drives and time on reinstalling everything on the new drive, only to find out that the BIOS cannot use such large drives, and cursing that I had to purchase a drive whose capacity is exactly 100 times what I can use.
Message to drive manufacturers: Gimme reliable and quiet 2 - 4Gb drives, using the good old 50-pin connectors in both IDE and SCSI flavours, but providing all the modern refinements of Ultra DMA100, etc. and guaranteed for 5 years or more. Make them affordable too. We don't want any more stinky throw-away media storage, thanks you.
Right now, the default Adobe fonts that ship with XFree86 are pretty crap! Granted the URW fonts released thru the Gimp site could be good as well and maybe should replace the tired old Adobe fonts. In any case, I think that, from now on, XFree86 should ship with only 3 fonts by default: serif, sans, mono - all in UTF-8.
Whether the Type1 URW fonts or these new Bitstream fonts should get that prestigious role remains an open issue, but in any case, the fonts should cover as much of UTF-8 as possible and at least all of the following: Arabic, CJK (simplified forms only), Cyrillic, Latin, Hellenic, Judaic. Once we have that, we have default UTF-8 base fonts equal in strenght to Arial/Times New Roman/Courrier New, which any application can expect to find. This would at least solve the problems experienced by Opera and OpenOffice, for selecting sensible default fonts.
Really, it should be. If someone claims to be a webmaster, but consistantly checks their work ONLY in IE, they have earned the right to be shot dead. I really, honnestly mean it. Death to all self-proclaimed webmasters who don't know anything else than IE and cannot be bothered with W3C standards!
While I have NOT filled every field in the Advertising section, the fact that I selected "country: Finland" and "birth: 1970-1979" should be enough of a clue that I do NOT want any fucking ads from the American-latino dating agency Migente popping at me continuously!
Anna miulle suomenkielisiä mainoksia tai sitten mee pois, vitun norjalaishölmö!
Do CTRL-Q in Mozilla and, the next time you return, all your tabs are gone; so much for the oh-so-great tabs. Because of dumb oversights like this, Galeon and Mozilla aren't worth a hoot in real life, while Opera had already figured out the right way to do tabs, ages before Mozilla gave their first try at it. That, my friend, is the difference between a well-matured commercial product and an OSS hobbyist's project that gets there 5 years afterwards and still lacks the polish that real-life, non-hacker end-users need.
Unfortunately, this trend is intentional: What incentive would anyone have to buy a new PC or new parts, if they all were made to last forever? Obviously, there would be zero incentive. That's why the PC industry purposely make components that are less and less reliable, just to keep people on buying something new every once in a while.
As if this wasn't enough, he insisted that, if I ever started a competing company, he would gladly stop buying from my current employer and take his business my way, even going as far as offering to fund my startup, since he already knows that I can deliver the goods, while our CEO never gave him satisfaction even though his company is our main customer.
This was VERY obvious ass-kissing with hopes of seeing me agree to undercut my current employer by starting a competing company, but still... On a day like this, I cannot help but wanna go into town, grab a few whores and party all night! =)
PS: Other key customers have also repeatedly expressed their satisfaction in dealing with me as their Account Manager, all while venting their frustration at how clueless our CEO appears to be.
First post and a free CD of the Ozzbourne Show?
I recall a friend telling me, when we passed thru it, that there used to be a fairly huge industrial area nearby, until the 80's. Once the Soviet Union fell and the factories closed, they boarded up the place with aluminium siding and demolished the building at the entrance in 1989. The station itself was built on a bridge running over one of Moscow's rivers (I forgot which one). At one point, someone decided to call the long demolished site "cleared for future reconstruction work" and reopening was targetted for 2002. Perhaps someone in Moscow can update us?
The catch is (if you ignore the current burst allowing broad phone and e-mail tapping, in the name of anti-terrorism war), nobody can record anyone else without their prior consent, in most countries. The only exception is the police, where they have to obtain a warrant
Even then, depending on the jusrisdiction, they may postpone informing the subject of tapping operations, anywhere between 6 months after the end of the operation, to never at all; some countries impose an obligation to the police to eventually inform someone that his communications were being tapped, other countries don't and even allow the police to build whole cases on someone, Stasi-style, without anyone ever being told... until it is too late and they are in court.
In a nutshell, the police can videotape your arrest and do as they please with that, but you are not allowed to videotape their search of your house or to record a conversation with any public employee, in most countries.
That old statement about those prefering safety over freedom not being worthy of either comes to mind. I prefer freedom to fight police or politicians with equal tools, than the false security that George DoubleSnort Bush and his boys might be doing the right thing - which, btw, they are not: forget Bin Laden and Sadam! Kill Dubya and save the whole world from the blatant takover of the planet by idiots like Fiorina, Gates and Walton and their lobbying drones in Washignton!
While I really like GAIM for its all-in-one approach to messenging protocols, the authors deserve a kick in the balls for having windows that constantly raise to the front, every time someone sends you a message. The result is, you are typing an e-mail or programming and, all of a sudden, what you typed ends up in the wrong window, simply because GAIM is receiving an incoming message for you. Bad, Bad, Bad GAIM..
People coding window managers should also wake up to the fact that not everyone wants the latest application someone started to pop in their face, while they are returning to another window during the application startup. e.g. If I start OpenOffice and I know for fact that this piece of bloatware needs 5 minutes before the main window comes to screen, so I go back to typing e-mails until the application has loaded, I do not want frigging OpenOffice popping up and assuming thta what I was in the middle of typing was meant for its Untitled 1 document. As such, Xlib and other OSes' GUI libs should completely remove the ability for an application to request that one of its windows be raised and brought to the foreground since, anyhow, window mangement is the responsibility of... window managers.