What separates us from the US system though, is that the last two have held considerable sway in the last few years because we've operated under a minority government (i.e. the ruling party must get enough co-operation from the other parties to pass legislation).
In many ways I like having a minority government--the ruling party can't unilaterally push their agendas through, yet the other parties can't arbitrarily invoke a vote of no-confidence to bring the government down (voters may see it as a waste of their time and tax dollars, and punish the offending parties in the next election).
Canada also has a unified elections system, using pen and paper. No hanging chads, fraudulent voting machines with no paper trail, or other over-engineered shennanigans that differ from one electoral district to another, and the votes are all counted and results official (barring recounts) before the night is out. Election campaigns are also typically a mere 5-6 weeks long--we don't suffer from a year's worth or more of political campaigning and asinine TV ads.
There are also strict limits on donations/lobbying money by corporations and unions. Theoretically this reduces chances of corruption, but special interests groups like our equivalent of the RIAA are getting around these restriction in other ways.
The opposition parties will release evidence that an outside company BOUGHT those politicians and that their decision was made purely because of Microsoft's money.
Fat chance. Microsoft learned from the mistakes of their US antitrust trial.
They'll try and buy ALL the major political parties at the same time, not just the ones currently in power.
But, please, the biggest software company in the world should have at least a *little* dignity.
They don't have such dignity, and won't put these patents forward voluntarily.
Legal and business reasonings aside, the other reason they won't is that Microsoft is like a schoolyard bully--they're big, they make a lot of noise, and may even beat up on weaker parties now and then.
But like all bullies, they're cowards at heart, and won't do anything that could disrupt power base.
The rules defining how windows are ordered (from 'top' to 'bottom') are broken. One of two things _should_ happen: either all windows owned by the active application should sit on top of whatever else is being drawn (the macos classic way); or, individual windows should remain disconnected from other windows owned by their application. Instead, the current macos has a cumbersome mix of these two methods, resulting in behavior that is infrequent yet infuriating. While occasionally cumbersome, I've gotten used to it and actually prefer it to both Classic *and* Windows methods.
Under Classic Mac OS, you could never have windows disconnected from the app.
Under Windows, a window is *always* disconnected from the app. In XP they implemented a method of "grouping" similar tasks, but meant clicking a task group always *required* you to read and select the window you want. Task grouping is among the first things I disable when I log into a PC for the first time.
OS X blends the two--if you click on the app's Dock icon or cmd-tab to it, it brings all of its windows to the front, with the last window you were in top-most. If you want to select a specific window of an app (like Windows' grouped tasks), you still can by right-click on the app's Dock icon.
I bought a 1G iPod a few months after they came out. I eventually gave it to my brother after I got a 5G one, and AFAIK the battery still works--with the caveats that it won't play more than 5 hours straight off a charge anymore, and it'll go from full to flat in less than 4 days.
The free VMWare Server only allows a single snapshot, so you can't "pick any of the older images," you can only take a snapshot before experimenting and revert if it fubars it somehow.
Not saying that bmo was necessarily using VMWare Server, of course.
I can confirm this works in NeoOffice v2.1, Mac OSX's "native" version of Open Office. The instructions and popup messages between levels are in (I think) German though.
Doesn't work (for me). I'm using Azureus w/RC4, no fallback allowed. Tried changing ports according to suggested workarounds, but speeds still average less than 5K for both up and down.
Recently tried VPN tunelling. I was getting 300 k down/25 up. Life was good again!
Worked for all of one day. Now the VPN tunnel is limited to 30 K down, max--for ALL net traffic.
B5 is one of my two favourite SF series (Firefly is the other), but I have to disagree with you for some of these.
In the Beginning is good, but I absolutely hated Thirdspace and River of Souls. What colours my judgement was that these aired shortly after a fairly stellar fourth season, but disappointing first half of the 5th (yes, I know WHY the 5th season wasn't that great, and tried to adjust expectations for it). The storytelling just wasn't there for me in these two TV movies.
Babylon 5 and Firefly are my two favourite sci-fi shows. B5 did not, with few exceptions, use any hand-held camera for either live-action or SFX shots. B5 was the first to use all-CGI for their space effects shots though.
Star Trek's "wagon train to the stars" was a way of pitching the show to producers in terms they could understand, since cowboy westerns were all the rage at the time (so I've read). Actually watching the original series though, in no way did I get a sense of disparity between low and high tech within the same society / civilization.
On Firefly/Serenity though, the heroes are definitely on the trailing edge of everything--their ship is an obsolete class, they can't afford energy hand weapons, their meals are usually bereft of real food like fruits and vegetables, and they're always just two steps ahead of running out of money for fuel and parts. An entire episode mid-series dealt with the disastrous consequences of a spare part they couldn't afford. Kaylee, the ship's mechanic, had complained about not having a spare in the very first episode.
The heroes in Star Trek certainly weren't lacking in the latest human technology, and Federation technology was usually on par or better than all other political powers in the quadrant!
I was waiting to see if someone asked why we don't use TiVO or similar HD-recording system;-)
Bottom line is, I'm not the one actually using it or setting it up, my non-techy friends are. They got the DVD/VCR combo and one of them occasionally records stuff as it's broadcast. They want to move stuff to DVD (especially copying some old tapes before they get retired), but things haven't gone well so far.
I barely watch TV myself and never record anything to watch later, so I'm not putting out money for a DVR system, or time to build one myself.
As much as I like the convenience of digital recording (random access especially), I can see where they're coming from. Especially from a consumer electronics standpoint.
Our one, and so far only, experience with our DVD recorder (the TV/Video kind) illustrates why we haven't gotten rid of our VHS tapes yet.
Least steps to record onto a new VHS: 1) pop tape in 2) press record
Least steps to record onto new DVD (-RW in our case): 1) pop DVD in 2) wait 10 seconds before format options come up 3) wait 1 min for format to finish 4) select recording option (quality setting, etc) 5) begin recording
At the end of an hour-long show, I finally hit "stop" on the DVD recorder. In earlier, shorter tests it took about 30 seconds to write out the information for that hour. This time, it failed for some reason.
End result: the whole hour of recording was lost.
All the other nice features that would've come with recording to DVD were flushed right down the drain, for the simple reason the damn thing can't even guarantee that what I recorded would, in the end, actually be available to play back!
We had such a levy on iPods and other "recordable media" a few years back, it was struck down and collected levies had to be refunded. Now this organization wants to put the levies back (and expand them).
At the same time, the Canadian Recording Industry Association (think Canadian RIAA) is lobbying to eliminate fair use rights in order to "harmonize" with the US's draconian copyright system (the same harmonization that fucked over the Australians when they signed their free trade agreement with the US).
The attempt at double-dipping is truly mind boggling; it's depressing that no one in power cares.
Also, I think the French helped the USA in the revolutionary war more because they hated the British than had any love for us.
Everything a country does internationally is for self-serving interests. The US didn't go to Vietnam because they gave two jots about the people, they were there because of the communist threat. Likewise with Iraq--spreading freedom and democracy my ass.
However, I rather agree with you--the US doesn't "owe" France anything, any more than Europe "owes" the US for helping out in WWII (though my understanding is that some European countries did pay back the US in the years afterward; is this true, and did something similar happen with the US Independence War and France?)
Back in high school my first exposure to programming was MacBasic on Mac Pluses. My recollection of it was that it was very user friendly--it adhered to the Mac interface, and if you had a programming error it would not only identify which line it was, but what specifically the compiler was choking on.
Next term they'd been replaced with MS Basic. Its idea of informing you of errors was the line number and "Syntax error" or something similarly vague and useless to a programmer still getting his feet wet. At the time I had no idea why the change was done, but it was definitely not appreciated.
Until then I had no opinion of Microsoft either way, but after using MS Basic my opinion of them soured, and it's been downhill with them ever since.
Taxman is what I've been using the last three years. It's free, and when you're done you just print off the necessary pages (no electronic filing, which the author says would cost him significant time and expense to implement due to red tape).
I think you should move someplace without all the snow and ice. Rubber tires and ice just don't go together; never have, never will. I've never understood how people ever thought it was normal to expect people to drive in such dangerous conditions far beyond the design limits of their vehicles.
I live in a mid-sized city that got a lot of snow today; about time, frankly. Had the ice a few weeks back. Minimal accidents and no fatalities in both cases (AFAIK).
We don't get the damage-causing hurricanes that can cause truly massive damage from winds and flooding, and we're at extremely low risk of getting carved up by tornadoes, or shattered by earthquakes, or spit on by volcanoes.
If one only considers the risk of being killed due to Mother Nature's effects, I prefer where I am versus most other choice places to live.
This has as much effect on podcasts and the like as legislation against DVD-ripping software developed and hosted in Europe.
Just how the hell do they intend to enforce US laws against foreign produced and/or hosted content?
Don't use the temporary shutdown of ThePirateBay as an example; the majority of podcasts are perfectly legit, otherwise Apple wouldn't dare point to them in iTunes.
The worst incompatibility that users are likely to encounter between Mac/PC Office files: images pasted from the Mac clipboard (or drag/dropped from the Safari browser) show up fine as long as you're on a Mac, but an erroneous "Quicktime / TIFF decompressor could not be found" error appears in its stead if you open it on a PC.
Dragged-and-dropped image files from the Finder are fine, as are those put in via Insert > Image. But, copy/paste is done far more often.
This has been going on at least as far back as Mac Ofice 98, and is still in v2004. All MS had to do was auto-convert the pasted image to whatever format MS normally uses (Windows Metafile perhaps; it's certainly not BMP or JPG). Macs, after all, have no issue viewing images pasted into the Windows versions of Office.
The "compatibility checker" in Mac Office 2004 doesn't catch this. Imagine an electronically-submitted assignment--the average Mac user has no clue it's broken, and another point goes to MS when the PC user thinks to himself ahah, Macs ARE less compatible!
Bridge Commander becomes a lot more than okay when you start adding free mods that enhance the Quick Battle mode.
Start with NanoFX--among other things, damage to warp engines now appear as plasma trails instead of "smoke in space."
Granted, many mods are visual improvments to stock ship models and effects, or add new ships. Some others though allow beaming to an allied ship, or separating saucer (and other, if available) sections during combat.
Actually, I have to confess I've never played the "normal" game; it's always been Quick Battle with mods. It's a great tactical game using capital ships that move like the monsters they are.
A similar argument was made a few days ago regarding China possibly mandating standard power and data connection plugs. The same counter-argument can be made here--it would prevent improvements to the mandated standard.
Admittedly, most plugs are different just to keep them proprietary, so the manufacturers can charge an arm and leg to replace your old/worn out adapter, but every now and there really is an improvement, like the MagSafe plugs that power Apple's Macbook and Macbook Pros.
I recently upgraded to an Intel Core 2 Duo Macbook with 1 GB of RAM. My old machine was a dual-533 MHz G4 with 768 MB. Both are running the latest 10.4.8 OS.
Although operationally the Macbook smokes my old G4 at any given task, sometimes it develops very noticable lags in switching apps, and otherwise basic responsiveness issues. At the moment I attribute this to a) occasionally firing up PowerPC-only apps under Rosetta, and b) the 5400 RPM hard drive which takes longer to load stuff into RAM and read/write the swap file. I can't really test either assumption at the moment since I can't pay to upgrade my RAM to 2 GB, or my hard drive to a 7200 RPM one.
One other factor is that I rarely shutdown/restart my Macbook, instead putting it to sleep. Every time I stopped using my G4 for more than a few hours, it would be shut down and the swap file reset.
Out of curiosity, what's your preferred alternative?
MPEG - open, but filesizes are too big Quicktime - proprietary, not as widely used WMV - proprietary RealVideo - proprietary, with plenty of Slashdot hate toward the company Ogg video - no market penetration XVID/various "divx" AVIs - low market penetration
I suppose the best open and reasonably widespread alternative is mpeg 4, but I'm interested in what you think websites ought to use instead of Flash.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a toss-up--we currently have four parties represented in the Canadian Parliament (Conservative, Liberal, Bloc Quebecois, and New Democratic Party), but only the first two have held power throughout the years.
What separates us from the US system though, is that the last two have held considerable sway in the last few years because we've operated under a minority government (i.e. the ruling party must get enough co-operation from the other parties to pass legislation).
In many ways I like having a minority government--the ruling party can't unilaterally push their agendas through, yet the other parties can't arbitrarily invoke a vote of no-confidence to bring the government down (voters may see it as a waste of their time and tax dollars, and punish the offending parties in the next election).
Canada also has a unified elections system, using pen and paper. No hanging chads, fraudulent voting machines with no paper trail, or other over-engineered shennanigans that differ from one electoral district to another, and the votes are all counted and results official (barring recounts) before the night is out. Election campaigns are also typically a mere 5-6 weeks long--we don't suffer from a year's worth or more of political campaigning and asinine TV ads.
There are also strict limits on donations/lobbying money by corporations and unions. Theoretically this reduces chances of corruption, but special interests groups like our equivalent of the RIAA are getting around these restriction in other ways.
Fat chance. Microsoft learned from the mistakes of their US antitrust trial.
They'll try and buy ALL the major political parties at the same time, not just the ones currently in power.
They don't have such dignity, and won't put these patents forward voluntarily.
Legal and business reasonings aside, the other reason they won't is that Microsoft is like a schoolyard bully--they're big, they make a lot of noise, and may even beat up on weaker parties now and then.
But like all bullies, they're cowards at heart, and won't do anything that could disrupt power base.
They'd also need to argue with the Earth Alliance, since Babylon 5 orbits the third planet of Epsilon Eridani. :-)
Under Classic Mac OS, you could never have windows disconnected from the app.
Under Windows, a window is *always* disconnected from the app. In XP they implemented a method of "grouping" similar tasks, but meant clicking a task group always *required* you to read and select the window you want. Task grouping is among the first things I disable when I log into a PC for the first time.
OS X blends the two--if you click on the app's Dock icon or cmd-tab to it, it brings all of its windows to the front, with the last window you were in top-most. If you want to select a specific window of an app (like Windows' grouped tasks), you still can by right-click on the app's Dock icon.
I bought a 1G iPod a few months after they came out. I eventually gave it to my brother after I got a 5G one, and AFAIK the battery still works--with the caveats that it won't play more than 5 hours straight off a charge anymore, and it'll go from full to flat in less than 4 days.
The free VMWare Server only allows a single snapshot, so you can't "pick any of the older images," you can only take a snapshot before experimenting and revert if it fubars it somehow.
Not saying that bmo was necessarily using VMWare Server, of course.
I can confirm this works in NeoOffice v2.1, Mac OSX's "native" version of Open Office. The instructions and popup messages between levels are in (I think) German though.
Doesn't work (for me). I'm using Azureus w/RC4, no fallback allowed. Tried changing ports according to suggested workarounds, but speeds still average less than 5K for both up and down.
/25 up. Life was good again!
Recently tried VPN tunelling. I was getting 300 k down
Worked for all of one day. Now the VPN tunnel is limited to 30 K down, max--for ALL net traffic.
Starting to look at Bell's Sympatico...
B5 is one of my two favourite SF series (Firefly is the other), but I have to disagree with you for some of these.
In the Beginning is good, but I absolutely hated Thirdspace and River of Souls. What colours my judgement was that these aired shortly after a fairly stellar fourth season, but disappointing first half of the 5th (yes, I know WHY the 5th season wasn't that great, and tried to adjust expectations for it). The storytelling just wasn't there for me in these two TV movies.
Babylon 5 and Firefly are my two favourite sci-fi shows. B5 did not, with few exceptions, use any hand-held camera for either live-action or SFX shots. B5 was the first to use all-CGI for their space effects shots though.
Star Trek's "wagon train to the stars" was a way of pitching the show to producers in terms they could understand, since cowboy westerns were all the rage at the time (so I've read). Actually watching the original series though, in no way did I get a sense of disparity between low and high tech within the same society / civilization.
On Firefly/Serenity though, the heroes are definitely on the trailing edge of everything--their ship is an obsolete class, they can't afford energy hand weapons, their meals are usually bereft of real food like fruits and vegetables, and they're always just two steps ahead of running out of money for fuel and parts. An entire episode mid-series dealt with the disastrous consequences of a spare part they couldn't afford. Kaylee, the ship's mechanic, had complained about not having a spare in the very first episode.
The heroes in Star Trek certainly weren't lacking in the latest human technology, and Federation technology was usually on par or better than all other political powers in the quadrant!
I was waiting to see if someone asked why we don't use TiVO or similar HD-recording system ;-)
Bottom line is, I'm not the one actually using it or setting it up, my non-techy friends are. They got the DVD/VCR combo and one of them occasionally records stuff as it's broadcast. They want to move stuff to DVD (especially copying some old tapes before they get retired), but things haven't gone well so far.
I barely watch TV myself and never record anything to watch later, so I'm not putting out money for a DVR system, or time to build one myself.
As much as I like the convenience of digital recording (random access especially), I can see where they're coming from. Especially from a consumer electronics standpoint.
Our one, and so far only, experience with our DVD recorder (the TV/Video kind) illustrates why we haven't gotten rid of our VHS tapes yet.
Least steps to record onto a new VHS:
1) pop tape in
2) press record
Least steps to record onto new DVD (-RW in our case):
1) pop DVD in
2) wait 10 seconds before format options come up
3) wait 1 min for format to finish
4) select recording option (quality setting, etc)
5) begin recording
At the end of an hour-long show, I finally hit "stop" on the DVD recorder. In earlier, shorter tests it took about 30 seconds to write out the information for that hour. This time, it failed for some reason.
End result: the whole hour of recording was lost.
All the other nice features that would've come with recording to DVD were flushed right down the drain, for the simple reason the damn thing can't even guarantee that what I recorded would, in the end, actually be available to play back!
We had such a levy on iPods and other "recordable media" a few years back, it was struck down and collected levies had to be refunded. Now this organization wants to put the levies back (and expand them).
At the same time, the Canadian Recording Industry Association (think Canadian RIAA) is lobbying to eliminate fair use rights in order to "harmonize" with the US's draconian copyright system (the same harmonization that fucked over the Australians when they signed their free trade agreement with the US).
The attempt at double-dipping is truly mind boggling; it's depressing that no one in power cares.
However, I rather agree with you--the US doesn't "owe" France anything, any more than Europe "owes" the US for helping out in WWII (though my understanding is that some European countries did pay back the US in the years afterward; is this true, and did something similar happen with the US Independence War and France?)
Back in high school my first exposure to programming was MacBasic on Mac Pluses. My recollection of it was that it was very user friendly--it adhered to the Mac interface, and if you had a programming error it would not only identify which line it was, but what specifically the compiler was choking on.
Next term they'd been replaced with MS Basic. Its idea of informing you of errors was the line number and "Syntax error" or something similarly vague and useless to a programmer still getting his feet wet. At the time I had no idea why the change was done, but it was definitely not appreciated.
Until then I had no opinion of Microsoft either way, but after using MS Basic my opinion of them soured, and it's been downhill with them ever since.
Then I found out MacBasic had been killed as part of a deal Apple made with Microsoft. Big surprise.
Taxman is what I've been using the last three years. It's free, and when you're done you just print off the necessary pages (no electronic filing, which the author says would cost him significant time and expense to implement due to red tape).
Windows-only, unfortunately.
I live in a mid-sized city that got a lot of snow today; about time, frankly. Had the ice a few weeks back. Minimal accidents and no fatalities in both cases (AFAIK).
We don't get the damage-causing hurricanes that can cause truly massive damage from winds and flooding, and we're at extremely low risk of getting carved up by tornadoes, or shattered by earthquakes, or spit on by volcanoes.
If one only considers the risk of being killed due to Mother Nature's effects, I prefer where I am versus most other choice places to live.
Host the podcasts in another country.
This has as much effect on podcasts and the like as legislation against DVD-ripping software developed and hosted in Europe.
Just how the hell do they intend to enforce US laws against foreign produced and/or hosted content?
Don't use the temporary shutdown of ThePirateBay as an example; the majority of podcasts are perfectly legit, otherwise Apple wouldn't dare point to them in iTunes.
The worst incompatibility that users are likely to encounter between Mac/PC Office files: images pasted from the Mac clipboard (or drag/dropped from the Safari browser) show up fine as long as you're on a Mac, but an erroneous "Quicktime / TIFF decompressor could not be found" error appears in its stead if you open it on a PC.
Dragged-and-dropped image files from the Finder are fine, as are those put in via Insert > Image. But, copy/paste is done far more often.
This has been going on at least as far back as Mac Ofice 98, and is still in v2004. All MS had to do was auto-convert the pasted image to whatever format MS normally uses (Windows Metafile perhaps; it's certainly not BMP or JPG). Macs, after all, have no issue viewing images pasted into the Windows versions of Office.
The "compatibility checker" in Mac Office 2004 doesn't catch this. Imagine an electronically-submitted assignment--the average Mac user has no clue it's broken, and another point goes to MS when the PC user thinks to himself ahah, Macs ARE less compatible!
Bridge Commander becomes a lot more than okay when you start adding free mods that enhance the Quick Battle mode.
Start with NanoFX--among other things, damage to warp engines now appear as plasma trails instead of "smoke in space."
Granted, many mods are visual improvments to stock ship models and effects, or add new ships. Some others though allow beaming to an allied ship, or separating saucer (and other, if available) sections during combat.
Actually, I have to confess I've never played the "normal" game; it's always been Quick Battle with mods. It's a great tactical game using capital ships that move like the monsters they are.
A similar argument was made a few days ago regarding China possibly mandating standard power and data connection plugs. The same counter-argument can be made here--it would prevent improvements to the mandated standard.
Admittedly, most plugs are different just to keep them proprietary, so the manufacturers can charge an arm and leg to replace your old/worn out adapter, but every now and there really is an improvement, like the MagSafe plugs that power Apple's Macbook and Macbook Pros.
I recently upgraded to an Intel Core 2 Duo Macbook with 1 GB of RAM. My old machine was a dual-533 MHz G4 with 768 MB. Both are running the latest 10.4.8 OS.
Although operationally the Macbook smokes my old G4 at any given task, sometimes it develops very noticable lags in switching apps, and otherwise basic responsiveness issues. At the moment I attribute this to a) occasionally firing up PowerPC-only apps under Rosetta, and b) the 5400 RPM hard drive which takes longer to load stuff into RAM and read/write the swap file. I can't really test either assumption at the moment since I can't pay to upgrade my RAM to 2 GB, or my hard drive to a 7200 RPM one.
One other factor is that I rarely shutdown/restart my Macbook, instead putting it to sleep. Every time I stopped using my G4 for more than a few hours, it would be shut down and the swap file reset.
Out of curiosity, what's your preferred alternative?
MPEG - open, but filesizes are too big
Quicktime - proprietary, not as widely used
WMV - proprietary
RealVideo - proprietary, with plenty of Slashdot hate toward the company
Ogg video - no market penetration
XVID/various "divx" AVIs - low market penetration
I suppose the best open and reasonably widespread alternative is mpeg 4, but I'm interested in what you think websites ought to use instead of Flash.
Live Anywhere, eh? Didn't we hear a similar marketing warcry from them a couple years ago?
Oh, right: "Plays for Sure."
Hopefully this'll play out just as well for them.