"I.e. how good the average life is for someone living in the country"
Exactly my point - the list does not seem to show this. If you look at healthcare, schooling, standard of living - as far as I know both Luxembourg and Switzerland absolutely kicks Swedens butt. In the list, however, they are both rated lower than Sweden.
Healthcare is not free in Sweden. The politicians say that it is free but it is a complete lie. Case in point: If I get sick in Switzerland - I go to a doctor - he prescribes medicine, I go to the pharmacy and show them my healthinsurance card. For this I pay 0 - nothing!. If I get sick in Sweden - I first try to make an appointment. A month later - I get to see the doctor. The doctor charges me something like 40 USD for the pleasure of meeting him/her. I go to the pharmacy to get my medicine. I have to pay for the medicine. Medicine is expensive. - Please explain to me how this is free?
If you study at the ETH in Zurich you pay something like 1400 USD (they just doubled it)/year tuition fee. When you graduate - you get a job with a good wage (at least double that of what you would get in Sweden) and you pay around 10% income tax. The investment in education pays off immediately.
If you study at KTH in Stockholm, you dont pay for tuition (unless they've changed this since I left). But when you get out you're lucky if you get a net wage of around 1600 USD / month net, paying approx 40-50% income tax (and dont forget 25% sales tax, + tax on basically everything). When talking to a Swedish professor in economics - he pointed out that it was not until he was 56 years old that his life earnings surpassed those of a construction worker. The only way an investment in education pays off (if you're living in Sweden) is if you emigrate.
The rules for unemployed people seem quite similar for both countries except that you get a hell of a lot more money in Switzerland.
The unemployment rate in Zurich is around 3-4 percent - and this is the highest unemployment rate in Switzerland. The unemployment rate in Sweden is approximately 16 % (if you include all people who are looking for work without finding it - ie: excluding the political maneuvering to hide the unemployment in various pseudo work).
I draw the conclusion that the list is just a political statement that serves to spread the illusion that the irresponsible fiscal policies mixed with socialism so popular in many EU countries is a good thing. Yeah right.
The place is dead during the winter.. but during the summer (those two months) the place kicks ass. Since they've screwed up the economy, its really cheap to come there as a tourist from a country with a strong currency. So - the optimal solution is to work somewhere else and just go there during the summer.
Ok. I take it back. I'll put it this way: If you: - dont want to have good spending power - dont want to have access to good schools - dont want to live in a country with financial stability (the swedish currency has gone from 1-1 SEK/CHF to 6.4 - 1 SEK/CHF since the fifties). - want to live in a country where there is a tangible risk that the money that you've saved for your old age will be confiscated by the government (when I was living there - this was actually discussed in parliament). - dont want to live in a country with agreable climate - dont want to live in a country where summer exceeds 2 months / year.
Yeah..well.. I don't know how they measure this, but I must say that I'm slightly puzzled by this list.
I've lived and worked in Sweden and I just cant see how they can reach number 4. Sweden is a socialist hole where you get to keep a miniscule part of your salary after the state has been there to rob you (they call it tax). I would *never* want to live in Sweden again. The same goes for Norway where they seem to love taxes. They have no public debt but still consider it reasonable to end up with less than half of your wage after paying tax (still its not as bad as Sweden). Switzerland should be way higher on the list - I'm currently living in Switzerland and the standard of living, net income, economic freedom, efficiency of public institutions etc. is vastly superiour to that of most countries in the EU.
Most likely, this list is created with an over-emphasis on the benefits of public consumption. It probably does not correct for the inherent inefficiencies of public administration, equating it to consumption within the private sector.
But then again, a lot of these fluffy people working within the UN *adore* big government and the *magic* of public spending..
Maybe he doesnt speak German? That was the problem when I moved to Switzerland - I found tons of pages, but it would take me hours to decipher what they meant. I found that the easiest way to get some info was to ask on the LUG groups of zurich, using irc./m
Same question - different country: - Does anyone know about the connectivity in Jamaica? I understand you can get ADSL - but is it available everywhere or just in a few areas. Any alternatives to ADSL (I hate using modems)..?
Well - this problem seems to be impacting the ppl from North America. Check below for the current status within the EU - if someone knows of any new developments - please post!
Dow Jones Business News EU Parliament Bans Proprietory Printer Cartridge Policy Wednesday December 18, 10:40 am ET
BRUSSELS -(Dow Jones)- In a blow to Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HPQ - News; HP) and other printer companies, the European Parliament voted unanimously Wednesday to ban them from forcing consumers to buy manufacturers' own-brand ink refills.
The printer-ink provision was included in a last-minute amendment to a bill requiring manufacturers of electronic goods to pay for recycling them. Conservatives supported it as a consumer-friendly action, while environmentalists welcomed it as a green measure.
"Consumers who are fed up with being ripped off when they need to replace the ink cartridges in their computer printers will be pleased with the requirement," said Robert Goodwill, a Conservative member of the parliament who sponsored the amendment.
The bill comes into effect in 2006.
Many color printers cost about EUR100 to buy, but replacement cartridges run as much as EUR40 each, Goodwill said. Companies have sprung up offering cheaper cartridge ink refills. But Goodwill said manufacturers had limited the use of the refills by installing computer chips on their original cartridges.
"When the cartridges are refilled, the printer comes up with an error message and many users are forced to buy expensive new cartridges from manufacturers," Goodwill said.
The practice may be harmful to the environment, as it limits recycling, and to consumers, but it has been beneficial to printer companies. H-P's ink and toner refills bring in about $10 billion annually, or about 15% of its annual revenue.
H-P dominates the market. According to consulting company CAP, H-P now has 44% of the $11 billion West-European market for printer ink, with Seiko Corp.'s Epson (J.SKO) unit with about 25%, Canon Inc. (CAJ) with 18% and Lexmark International Inc. (NYSE:LXK - News) with 10%.
Suppliers who refill ink cartridges or sell knockoffs have about one-fourth of the market, according to CAP. But their share is static.
Their complaints have attracted the attention of European Union Competition Commissioner Mario Monti. In May, he said regulators were looking into possible anticompetitive behavior by some printer makers.
"There's probably a case here for us," Monti said at the time. Since then, the Commission has been silent on the issue.
Complaints from refillers also attracted parliamentarian Goodwill. He visited the local Cartridge World shop in York and came away determined to insert the amendment into the larger bill about recycling of electronics goods. He and a Green parliamentarian first inserted the amendment back in October.
But the German government supported the printer companies' attempts to remove it this week. Bargaining between parliamentarians and governments went until 3 a.m. Wednesday morning, Goodwill said.
"The Germans wanted to defend their chemical companies which make this ink for the printer companies," he said. "When we threatened to hold up the entire recycling bill, they finally dropped their objections."
The printer companies still can appeal to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. H-P declined to comment. Spokespeople for Canon and Lexmark said they were unaware of the issue.
-By William Echikson, Dow Jones Newswires; 32-2-285-0134; william.echikson@ dowjones.com
A patent is like a baseball bat made out of rubber. When you're competing against other companies - you both get out your set of rubber baseball bats and hand them over to your lawyers who proceed to pummel eachother. After a while - one of the sides will tell their lawyers to stop since they're running out of money (lawyer batsmen are rather expensive). The side who gives up looses - the winning side buys the looser for 5cents (since they're bankrupt).
These are the current rules (in the US, but also to a varying degree in the EU) of the "game" called free enterprise. They are quite senseless and arbitrary - but you have to adapt since lawyers equipped with rubber baseball bats exist whether you want them to or not.
Ultimately, every people has the responsibility for its government (if you cant handle this responsibility - then you become a refugee) - and subsequently also for the laws passed. If the rules of the game are ignorant, they are so for a reason. And since ignorance is usually expensive - in the long run, someone will allways have to foot the bill. Bad policies allways have a monetary cost.
Amazon, Google are naturally doing the right thing since their primary task is to generate profits for their owners - it is not to make policy or specify the rules of the game (the government is supposed to do this on behalf of the voters). The politicians are obviously doing the right thing since they're basically excercising their mandate of doing what the average joe has given them authority to do. - so I guess that makes the average joe the bad guy/gal. At least the responsibility lies with the same people who are going to pay the price.
It kinda reminds me of a favourite quote: "if you think education is expensive - you should try ignorance!"/m
Interesting... they're obviously not going to be running other os'es than Windows but they're clearly going after the serious servermarket (zOs or >=Sun E10K). The only way Linux could compete with this is through UserModeLinux and mosix running (with a friendly gui) on Linux machines. Just my 3c (inflation),/m
I used to order the "Moslem meal" every time I was flying since it seemed to be a lot more tasty than the traditional crap. When travelling more frequently, I noticed that they dont vary the moslem meal very often and if I would fly more than 2 flights / week I would get the same dish when ordering the Moslem meal - so I switched back to the traditional junk. I guess, now that the US has access to flight details, they'll think Im a terrorist. Pity. But on the other hand - the way the US has behaved since the sep11, I dont really feel like going there. The paranoid people of the US should spend some more time with ppl from South Africa, England, Northern Ireland, Spain etc. to get a bit of distance. As terrorist attacks seem to happen more often in the US nowadays, you cant afford this brain-paralysis to set in as soon as a bomb goes off. The only people served by that behaviour are the terrorists.
Re:just what I always wanted
on
SAUNAAB
·
· Score: 1
:-) Personally, I follow a somewhat modified motto: Don't live in a place where the _climate_ might kill you if you go outside.
I would prefer living in - say - Joburg, even though the crime can be a bit iffy at times, than living in the nordic region (where the climate is iffy most of the time).
What would you prefer - some armed robber burgling your house when you're at home or when you're not there. I live in Switzerland..burglaries here seem to be a non existent phenomenon. Maybe its because all adult men are obliged to keep a fully automatic assault rifle at home?
Re:Their loyalty to Open Source stops at the deskt
on
IBM Buys Rational Software
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
oh.. and how would you explain WSAD (WebSphere Application Developer)? - this is their new strategic development platform and its based on Eclipse (opensource) and it runs on Linux (ok..the Linux version has been lagging a bit but as of the next release both the Linux and Win versions have the same milestone dates). - My guess is that we'll see WSAD incorporating Rational Rose as a view in WSAD. This will make WSAD an incredibly complete tool. It's only viable competitor in the marketplace for J2EE development will be TogetherJ.
One mistake they made though: SWT!!? - they should have based SWT on gtk instead of motif.. - My guess is that they'll have to rework this within 3 years. They could have done it right from the start but maybe they're just waiting for Sun to implement the java/gtk part (why pay for it when someone else is doing it for free?)
The only occasion when desktop is "verboten" is when selling workstations and laptops. This is not a result of free choice - this is the result of the dominating position of Microsoft. This problem should be rectified through the courts since it is clearly an effect of Microsofts illegal leveraging of its dominant position.
So...if I get you straight - India is a great big country consisting of people who suck at innovation and manufacturing and who therefore has but only one hope: to produce custom software for an operating system sold by a american company called Microsoft.
It's an interesting concept: streamlining an entire country so as to act as a subcontractor to one american company instead of targeting a world wide market. Its moronic, but nevertheless: interesting.
The best thing India could do to lift those 700 Million people out of poverty is to deregulate trade and privatize publicly owned industries. Is there anyone but the indians who arent surprised that socialism isnt generating wealth for the population?
This is the least of your worries.. when you have 100+ contractors at a 400gbp/hour each waiting for some senior engineer to find out what this code *really* does - thats when you really start to hurt./m
One thing that surprises me is that VM's been around for years in mainframe environments while failing to become known to the "linux community". UML seems rather similar to the traditional mainframe functionality (having several VM's running os390/zOs images). For more info on how IBM does it (they've done this for years) and why - look into the redbooks downloadable from IBM's website. Why does IBM have 5 9's ? - because of sysplex enabling and VM. This is a REALLY Good Thing (tm). If we could combine mosix and UML with tons of administrative scripts and monitoring software - we would basically have an incredible environment that would rival that of zOs/os390. That would be cool./m
Judging from the way Epson deals with GPL/opensource and Linux I made the decision that my next printer will be an Epson. Even though they made a mistake - they seem to be attempting to correct it and Im sure that there will be a good solution to this shortly./m
In Luxembourg the Banking secrecy legislation is very tight. It is, for instance, illegal to divulge any information regarding the client in the following situations: - Divulging information to other legal entities in the same concern (ie communication between the insurance arm and the banking arm of a financial institution). - to give out information to anyone even though the client has approved or ordered that the bank gives out information regarding the client relationship.
An example: in most countries its perfectly legal to have an offshore account. In some countries its ruled ok only if that citicen (the client) agrees to instruct the bank to share all information with the taxation authorities in the clients home jurisdiction. If you send a letter to a bank in luxembourg with such an instruction - they will straight away file the instruction in the round cabinet (that goes to recycling every day;-). If they, however, choose to give out the specified information they will be (the actual clerk and possibly his/her manager) liable for a 5 year jail sentance. Privacy is ruled to be of the utmost importance in Luxembourg. Moreso than even the Swiss.
- Why am I ranting about this? - well, all these bankers use computers. They usually use Windows computers. Computers that sometime (quite often if you take a look at Zone alarm) choose to send information from the bank to an external party. What information that is being sent is not disclosed by microsoft. No one knows. But more seriously: - If you allow Microsoft to be root - by definition you give them unlimited access to information regarding the clients of the bank. So who would be guilty (who would get 5 years in prison) ? - well, if the EULA is valid i the EU (not entirely sure that it would hold up in a court of law ) it should be the sysadm that clicks through the EULA . Otherwise, you could possibly point the finger to the head of security, within the bank, who decided to accept the EULA...
IMHO: - After working with approx 10 large companies (multinationals), I have come to the conclusion that HR is usually composed of a large number of mentally impaired mammals (barely) who are inately unable to find their asshole with both hands./m
Yet another example of how classical free market economics don't exactly model the real world - Not neccessarily. There are a number of prerequisites to having an efficient free market. One of them is that all parties have equal and unlimited access to information. Since IT is kinda young - the ability to absorb technology related information is not exactly permeating upper management. This leads to a less efficient free market. However, this should be a passing trend since the markets _will_ (eventually) punish this suboptimized behaviour and reward those who do The Right Thing (tm)./m
Slashdot Mirror
"I.e. how good the average life is for someone living in the country"
/year tuition fee. When you graduate - you get a job with a good wage (at least double that of what you would get in Sweden) and you pay around 10% income tax. The investment in education pays off immediately.
Exactly my point - the list does not seem to show this. If you look at healthcare, schooling, standard of living - as far as I know both Luxembourg and Switzerland absolutely kicks Swedens butt. In the list, however, they are both rated lower than Sweden.
Healthcare is not free in Sweden. The politicians say that it is free but it is a complete lie. Case in point:
If I get sick in Switzerland - I go to a doctor - he prescribes medicine, I go to the pharmacy and show them my healthinsurance card. For this I pay 0 - nothing!.
If I get sick in Sweden - I first try to make an appointment. A month later - I get to see the doctor. The doctor charges me something like 40 USD for the pleasure of meeting him/her. I go to the pharmacy to get my medicine. I have to pay for the medicine. Medicine is expensive. - Please explain to me how this is free?
If you study at the ETH in Zurich you pay something like 1400 USD (they just doubled it)
If you study at KTH in Stockholm, you dont pay for tuition (unless they've changed this since I left). But when you get out you're lucky if you get a net wage of around 1600 USD / month net, paying approx 40-50% income tax (and dont forget 25% sales tax, + tax on basically everything). When talking to a Swedish professor in economics - he pointed out that it was not until he was 56 years old that his life earnings surpassed those of a construction worker. The only way an investment in education pays off (if you're living in Sweden) is if you emigrate.
The rules for unemployed people seem quite similar for both countries except that you get a hell of a lot more money in Switzerland.
The unemployment rate in Zurich is around 3-4 percent - and this is the highest unemployment rate in Switzerland.
The unemployment rate in Sweden is approximately 16 % (if you include all people who are looking for work without finding it - ie: excluding the political maneuvering to hide the unemployment in various pseudo work).
I draw the conclusion that the list is just a political statement that serves to spread the illusion that the irresponsible fiscal policies mixed with socialism so popular in many EU countries is a good thing.
Yeah right.
The place is dead during the winter.. but during the summer (those two months) the place kicks ass. Since they've screwed up the economy, its really cheap to come there as a tourist from a country with a strong currency. So - the optimal solution is to work somewhere else and just go there during the summer.
:-)
Looking forward to the blon.. summer!
You would love Switzerland. Its like Canada (same benefits) - only taxes are lower than the US.
Ok. I take it back.
I'll put it this way:
If you:
- dont want to have good spending power
- dont want to have access to good schools
- dont want to live in a country with financial stability (the swedish currency has gone from 1-1 SEK/CHF to 6.4 - 1 SEK/CHF since the fifties).
- want to live in a country where there is a tangible risk that the money that you've saved for your old age will be confiscated by the government (when I was living there - this was actually discussed in parliament).
- dont want to live in a country with agreable climate
- dont want to live in a country where summer exceeds 2 months / year.
THEN - maybe Sweden is the place for you!
Aww *shucks*. Does this mean that I'm not going to get the DVD rewinder? - I was kinda looking forward to that :-(
Hmm....yeah.. it kinda dawned on me too.. /m
It would be a hell of a lot more enjoyable to watch...
Yeah..well.. I don't know how they measure this, but I must say that I'm slightly puzzled by this list.
I've lived and worked in Sweden and I just cant see how they can reach number 4. Sweden is a socialist hole where you get to keep a miniscule part of your salary after the state has been there to rob you (they call it tax). I would *never* want to live in Sweden again. The same goes for Norway where they seem to love taxes. They have no public debt but still consider it reasonable to end up with less than half of your wage after paying tax (still its not as bad as Sweden). Switzerland should be way higher on the list - I'm currently living in Switzerland and the standard of living, net income, economic freedom, efficiency of public institutions etc. is vastly superiour to that of most countries in the EU.
Most likely, this list is created with an over-emphasis on the benefits of public consumption. It probably does not correct for the inherent inefficiencies of public administration, equating it to consumption within the private sector.
But then again, a lot of these fluffy people working within the UN *adore* big government and the *magic* of public spending..
Maybe he doesnt speak German? That was the problem when I moved to Switzerland - I found tons of pages, but it would take me hours to decipher what they meant. I found that the easiest way to get some info was to ask on the LUG groups of zurich, using irc. /m
Same question - different country:
- Does anyone know about the connectivity in Jamaica?
I understand you can get ADSL - but is it available everywhere or just in a few areas. Any alternatives to ADSL (I hate using modems)..?
Well - this problem seems to be impacting the ppl from North America. Check below for the current status within the EU - if someone knows of any new developments - please post!
Dow Jones Business News
EU Parliament Bans Proprietory Printer Cartridge Policy
Wednesday December 18, 10:40 am ET
BRUSSELS -(Dow Jones)- In a blow to Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE:HPQ - News; HP) and other printer companies, the European Parliament voted unanimously Wednesday to ban them from forcing consumers to buy manufacturers' own-brand ink refills.
The printer-ink provision was included in a last-minute amendment to a bill requiring manufacturers of electronic goods to pay for recycling them. Conservatives supported it as a consumer-friendly action, while environmentalists welcomed it as a green measure.
"Consumers who are fed up with being ripped off when they need to replace the ink cartridges in their computer printers will be pleased with the requirement," said Robert Goodwill, a Conservative member of the parliament who sponsored the amendment.
The bill comes into effect in 2006.
Many color printers cost about EUR100 to buy, but replacement cartridges run as much as EUR40 each, Goodwill said. Companies have sprung up offering cheaper cartridge ink refills. But Goodwill said manufacturers had limited the use of the refills by installing computer chips on their original cartridges.
"When the cartridges are refilled, the printer comes up with an error message and many users are forced to buy expensive new cartridges from manufacturers," Goodwill said.
The practice may be harmful to the environment, as it limits recycling, and to consumers, but it has been beneficial to printer companies. H-P's ink and toner refills bring in about $10 billion annually, or about 15% of its annual revenue.
H-P dominates the market. According to consulting company CAP, H-P now has 44% of the $11 billion West-European market for printer ink, with Seiko Corp.'s Epson (J.SKO) unit with about 25%, Canon Inc. (CAJ) with 18% and Lexmark International Inc. (NYSE:LXK - News) with 10%.
Suppliers who refill ink cartridges or sell knockoffs have about one-fourth of the market, according to CAP. But their share is static.
Their complaints have attracted the attention of European Union Competition Commissioner Mario Monti. In May, he said regulators were looking into possible anticompetitive behavior by some printer makers.
"There's probably a case here for us," Monti said at the time. Since then, the Commission has been silent on the issue.
Complaints from refillers also attracted parliamentarian Goodwill. He visited the local Cartridge World shop in York and came away determined to insert the amendment into the larger bill about recycling of electronics goods. He and a Green parliamentarian first inserted the amendment back in October.
But the German government supported the printer companies' attempts to remove it this week. Bargaining between parliamentarians and governments went until 3 a.m. Wednesday morning, Goodwill said.
"The Germans wanted to defend their chemical companies which make this ink for the printer companies," he said. "When we threatened to hold up the entire recycling bill, they finally dropped their objections."
The printer companies still can appeal to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. H-P declined to comment. Spokespeople for Canon and Lexmark said they were unaware of the issue.
-By William Echikson, Dow Jones Newswires; 32-2-285-0134; william.echikson@ dowjones.com
Dow Jones Newswires
12-18-02 1040ET
A patent is like a baseball bat made out of rubber. When you're competing against other companies - you both get out your set of rubber baseball bats and hand them over to your lawyers who proceed to pummel eachother. After a while - one of the sides will tell their lawyers to stop since they're running out of money (lawyer batsmen are rather expensive). The side who gives up looses - the winning side buys the looser for 5cents (since they're bankrupt).
/m
These are the current rules (in the US, but also to a varying degree in the EU) of the "game" called free enterprise. They are quite senseless and arbitrary - but you have to adapt since lawyers equipped with rubber baseball bats exist whether you want them to or not.
Ultimately, every people has the responsibility for its government (if you cant handle this responsibility - then you become a refugee) - and subsequently also for the laws passed. If the rules of the game are ignorant, they are so for a reason. And since ignorance is usually expensive - in the long run, someone will allways have to foot the bill. Bad policies allways have a monetary cost.
Amazon, Google are naturally doing the right thing since their primary task is to generate profits for their owners - it is not to make policy or specify the rules of the game (the government is supposed to do this on behalf of the voters).
The politicians are obviously doing the right thing since they're basically excercising their mandate of doing what the average joe has given them authority to do.
- so I guess that makes the average joe the bad guy/gal. At least the responsibility lies with the same people who are going to pay the price.
It kinda reminds me of a favourite quote: "if you think education is expensive - you should try ignorance!"
Interesting... they're obviously not going to be running other os'es than Windows but they're clearly going after the serious servermarket (zOs or >=Sun E10K). The only way Linux could compete with this is through UserModeLinux and mosix running (with a friendly gui) on Linux machines. /m
Just my 3c (inflation),
I used to order the "Moslem meal" every time I was flying since it seemed to be a lot more tasty than the traditional crap. When travelling more frequently, I noticed that they dont vary the moslem meal very often and if I would fly more than 2 flights / week I would get the same dish when ordering the Moslem meal - so I switched back to the traditional junk.
I guess, now that the US has access to flight details, they'll think Im a terrorist. Pity. But on the other hand - the way the US has behaved since the sep11, I dont really feel like going there.
The paranoid people of the US should spend some more time with ppl from South Africa, England, Northern Ireland, Spain etc. to get a bit of distance. As terrorist attacks seem to happen more often in the US nowadays, you cant afford this brain-paralysis to set in as soon as a bomb goes off. The only people served by that behaviour are the terrorists.
"Has anyone else resorted to this hack?
/m
-Mmm.... m4 on linux.
:-)
Personally, I follow a somewhat modified motto:
Don't live in a place where the _climate_ might kill you if you go outside.
I would prefer living in - say - Joburg, even though the crime can be a bit iffy at times, than living in the nordic region (where the climate is iffy most of the time).
What would you prefer - some armed robber burgling your house when you're at home or when you're not there.
I live in Switzerland..burglaries here seem to be a non existent phenomenon. Maybe its because all adult men are obliged to keep a fully automatic assault rifle at home?
oh .. and how would you explain WSAD (WebSphere Application Developer)? - this is their new strategic development platform and its based on Eclipse (opensource) and it runs on Linux (ok..the Linux version has been lagging a bit but as of the next release both the Linux and Win versions have the same milestone dates).
- My guess is that we'll see WSAD incorporating Rational Rose as a view in WSAD. This will make WSAD an incredibly complete tool. It's only viable competitor in the marketplace for J2EE development will be TogetherJ.
One mistake they made though: SWT!!? - they should have based SWT on gtk instead of motif..
- My guess is that they'll have to rework this within 3 years. They could have done it right from the start but maybe they're just waiting for Sun to implement the java/gtk part (why pay for it when someone else is doing it for free?)
The only occasion when desktop is "verboten" is when selling workstations and laptops. This is not a result of free choice - this is the result of the dominating position of Microsoft. This problem should be rectified through the courts since it is clearly an effect of Microsofts illegal leveraging of its dominant position.
...and more importantly - when you look at your perlcode after coming back from holiday; can you still see what it does/how it works? /m
So...if I get you straight - India is a great big country consisting of people who suck at innovation and manufacturing and who therefore has but only one hope: to produce custom software for an operating system sold by a american company called Microsoft.
It's an interesting concept: streamlining an entire country so as to act as a subcontractor to one american company instead of targeting a world wide market. Its moronic, but nevertheless: interesting.
The best thing India could do to lift those 700 Million people out of poverty is to deregulate trade and privatize publicly owned industries. Is there anyone but the indians who arent surprised that socialism isnt generating wealth for the population?
This is the least of your worries.. when you have 100+ contractors at a 400gbp/hour each waiting for some senior engineer to find out what this code *really* does - thats when you really start to hurt. /m
One thing that surprises me is that VM's been around for years in mainframe environments while failing to become known to the "linux community". UML seems rather similar to the traditional mainframe functionality (having several VM's running os390/zOs images). For more info on how IBM does it (they've done this for years) and why - look into the redbooks downloadable from IBM's website. Why does IBM have 5 9's ? - because of sysplex enabling and VM. This is a REALLY Good Thing (tm). If we could combine mosix and UML with tons of administrative scripts and monitoring software - we would basically have an incredible environment that would rival that of zOs/os390. That would be cool. /m
Judging from the way Epson deals with GPL/opensource and Linux I made the decision that my next printer will be an Epson. Even though they made a mistake - they seem to be attempting to correct it and Im sure that there will be a good solution to this shortly. /m
In Luxembourg the Banking secrecy legislation is very tight. It is, for instance, illegal to divulge any information regarding the client in the following situations:
;-). If they, however, choose to give out the specified information they will be (the actual clerk and possibly his/her manager) liable for a 5 year jail sentance.
...
/m
- Divulging information to other legal entities in the same concern (ie communication between the insurance arm and the banking arm of a financial institution).
- to give out information to anyone even though the client has approved or ordered that the bank gives out information regarding the client relationship.
An example: in most countries its perfectly legal to have an offshore account. In some countries its ruled ok only if that citicen (the client) agrees to instruct the bank to share all information with the taxation authorities in the clients home jurisdiction. If you send a letter to a bank in luxembourg with such an instruction - they will straight away file the instruction in the round cabinet (that goes to recycling every day
Privacy is ruled to be of the utmost importance in Luxembourg. Moreso than even the Swiss.
- Why am I ranting about this? - well, all these bankers use computers. They usually use Windows computers. Computers that sometime (quite often if you take a look at Zone alarm) choose to send information from the bank to an external party. What information that is being sent is not disclosed by microsoft. No one knows.
But more seriously:
- If you allow Microsoft to be root - by definition you give them unlimited access to information regarding the clients of the bank. So who would be guilty (who would get 5 years in prison) ? - well, if the EULA is valid i the EU (not entirely sure that it would hold up in a court of law ) it should be the sysadm that clicks through the EULA . Otherwise, you could possibly point the finger to the head of security, within the bank, who decided to accept the EULA
Its a question of time...
IMHO: - After working with approx 10 large companies (multinationals), I have come to the conclusion that HR is usually composed of a large number of mentally impaired mammals (barely) who are inately unable to find their asshole with both hands. /m
Yet another example of how classical free market economics don't exactly model the real world /m
- Not neccessarily. There are a number of prerequisites to having an efficient free market. One of them is that all parties have equal and unlimited access to information. Since IT is kinda young - the ability to absorb technology related information is not exactly permeating upper management. This leads to a less efficient free market. However, this should be a passing trend since the markets _will_ (eventually) punish this suboptimized behaviour and reward those who do The Right Thing (tm).