Funcom (Anarchy Online, Longest Journey, Conan) is located in Oslo, they are hiring and English is their working language. Same goes for Opera (english, hiring and located in Oslo), but they generally pay really shit. I have no idea whether it's possible to get by at Trolltech (QT) without knowing Norwegian.. else I think there's employment in the oil industry where the working language is English (although quite often, this means you work three weeks at a rig, and then have two weeks off. The pay is ridicously good though).
Other than that, all the Scandinivian langauges are quite easy to pick up. We basically use english sentence structure, german words and our own pronounciation. Alot of the sounds are quite hard for Americans to get completely right, so you're going to sound like a foreigner a looong time, but for the most part, you only need to understand what we say in Norwegian; as long as you speak clearly everybody will understand everything you say in English; always (we hear English daily through TV, but most people *never* speak it).
Just to make it clear, as you probably understood (since you didn't swear at me:), my comment was more out of general frustration than than any specific gripe with the review (which was well-written).
(Hi! I'm continuing my general advice rant. Sorry for being stereotyphical / off-topic)
1. I live in a crazy socialist country where we believe in equal opportunities regardless of who your parents are, so education is free'ish here. So, I might not understand that aspect of American insanity too well:). He's welcome to move here though, there's *plenty* of room.
2. If you're young with small children you're probably at the point in life where you're at your poorest, have the most stuff you want to do (family vacations ftw!) and the most need for free time to spend with your budding family. Trying to save money at this stage really is, well, stupid.. besides, as you grow more experienced and get better at what you to, you will earn more money. Premature saving is like premature optimization, a bloody waste of effort:)
3. Money now is more worth now than later. When you were 5 100$ was a fortune, and when you were 20 5000$ was a fortune. Although this slows down, this trend continues. Spending the money you actually have *now* is in the majority of cases the best of maximizing your moneyquality-of-life exchange rate.
4. Most families have two cars and shitloads of crap. If you're worried about the future, get cheaper cars, a cheaper house and stop buying crap. Minimizing your expenses is as important as maximizing your incomce, and can usually be done with far smaller impact in your quality of life (barring potentially ruining your ability to gather useless crap). (and if you're wondering what I'm referring to as useless crap, just take *one* look in your garage and your kitchen, or if you're young still, your parents'. How much of that stuff did you really need?)
5. Saving money is nice and all, but don't let the future ruin the present. Being miserable now in order to potentially avoid misery later really only means maximizing the potential amount of misery. If you can do it while not ruining your life, sure, go ahead. If you can't; well.. don't!
6. How many people do you know that's had their quality of life significantly reduced by having parents that were too poor (but still decent hard-working, stable and loving)? How many people do you know that's have severe scars from their childhood due parents not being there for them? Focusing on giving your kids stuff is easy, being their friends and whatever is easy, but it has never, and will never, be what they need, nor will it ever be what they will be thankfull for when they grow up.
From end of review: As an exercise in full disclosure, I should confess to hosting two podcast series of my own, the AwareTek philosophical podcast, and the Python411 podcast about the Python programming language."
Full disclosure?! You sir, are going to be a good politician some day. Using a term which still has good connotations due to not being misused enough yet, and spinning your own shameless commercials as doing the readers a favour. Bloody hell!
Not that I think there's any wrong with plugging your own stuff at the end of a review, but for god's sake, be honest about it and avoid the self-sanctimonius crap!
Working with friends and teammates to take down a giant boss is more of an accomplishment to me than hiring a tour guide to take me to the top of Mt Everest.
In other words, you're ridicously fit and extremly bad at playing computer games?
But in this age of two parents working, those kinds of things don't happen anymore. I spend 12 hours out of my day commuting and working. I spend 12 hours out of my day commuting and working.
Come again? You are two people working; You don't need long work-days. You don't need jobs with good pay, you need jobs with adequate pay. Seriously, find regular 8-hour work, preferably close to where you live.
I mean, maybe you'll drop 20-30% in pay in the process, but you'll have time to actually enjoy life and actually meet your family.. and sleep occasionally:). Work is for getting for money you can spend on your freetime. Work is not your life.
.. and before you say this is easy for me to say; you are right, it is really easy. Just as easy as doing it. There's nothing holding you back besides you... and your own preconceived notions of having to compete for having the biggest salary, having the least time to enjoy said money and having wasted the money on the most amount of crap you can show to friends in order to impress them with how successfull and well-adjusted you are. Free your mind:)
Anybody know if random people will be able to program for it? If we can, I image will see a shitload of cool stuff, as that controller is sooo begging for simple cool games. I mean, just something like pong would be insanely fun:)
The Wii-equivalent of 'Mount and Blade' would utterly, utterly rock (M&B is a simple down-to-earth fighting game RPG'ish which gets simple fight-dynamics sooo right)
Me hitting the letter "e" will probably not take the same amount of energy to process twice. But I bet over 1000 e's the standard deviation could be found and would indicate that 66% of the time it's "x J +/- y" and so on...
But with different usage-patterns you *will* get consinstant differences..so sure, you'd get data, and they'd be valid, but that doesn't mean GP needs a stat-class. Regardless of how much people refuse to believe it, even in todays 'massage-the-data-until-you-find-something(anythin g-will-do)'-world, the ol' trusted "garbage in, garbage out" still holds.
Ah, good comment. However, it is quite a natural and logical demand to have all of the EULA available in norwegian, and not just that but good norwegian.
Hard for you to know, but the entire EULA is available in Norwegian (albeit quite horrible Norwegian, but lawyer-speak never was any good in any language). His complaint was concerning the actual iTunes store, where only parts of it (client-side) is availabel in Norwegian.
While I originally thought this to be a non-issue, I had to give in on it. The problem is that the EULA specifically demands for you to check the iTunes store for policy-changes, so actually understanding the text on the store actually becomes a necessity (as opposed to using it for shopping, which you really don't need to understand much english to do).
Either way, it's still kinda a non-issue, as most Norwegians have quite decent vocabularies and read English completely fluently (all movies are shown on English here). We may have a little trouble speaking English since we for some reason speak Norwegian to eachother constantly (hence some people being under the miscomprehension that we're 'bad' at English.. we just need a few minutes to switch), but we'll understand pretty much everything (Films without subtitles are generally ok, as long as there's not too much mumbling). In fact, I've met one person my entire life who wasn't functional in English and that's my Grandfather who dropped out of school when he was 12:)
I'm not saying I shy away from controversy. I'm an atheist, skeptic, scientist, and writer and have many links and comments about said topics on my site.
Congratulations; I think you managed to sum up everything that's wrong with America... completely unindended too:(
(for the dim: neither of these shouldhave been controversial in any way)
Alot of uneducated replies here, so since I just read the entire original complaint in Norwegian; so I'll summarize (numbering is my own). Oh, sorry for my bad attempt at formal'ish english, I'm kinda tired now:).. and sorry for replying to an early post to get this near the top:)
First and foremost; the whole problem here is that iTunes is specifically targetting the Norwegian market, as only Norwegians are allowed to use the Norwegian version of iTunes. This clearly sets it apart from most other net-stores which counts as *imports*. There is no doubt whatsoever that Norwegian laws apply here and this is probably a large reason why iTunes is being singled out. Forbrukerombudet (ombudsmann as you wrongly named him:)) did however note that several other services would be targetted soon (he lists a couple of music stores, but I can't find it now)
Complaint 1: In order for a contract to be valid under Norwegian contract law it has to be two-sided; that is outline both responsibilties and priviligies. The iTunes EULA is completely one-sided completely failing to provide you with any benefits whatsoever. They do not accept any responsibilities nor guarantee anything.
Complaint 2: The language itself is unclear. It does not define what 'service' as so far non-liability concerning downtime means. Does it means the store, the player, the DRM, etc? Added to this, all the terms are not available in Norwegian (which frankly, is pretty much the only point he makes I think is a non-issue).
Complaint 3: Their attempts at disallowing non-Norwegian credits-cards for use at Norwegian iTunes is against the European Free Trade Agreement (EFTA).
Complaint 4: Their attempt at having the right to change the contract/terms at any time whatsoever is clearly not allowed by Norwegian law. At the most extreme, if the iTunes EULA was valid they could instantly revoke your music without you having any say.
Complaint 5: No return-policy. This is required by Norwegian law; however this is one of several points he makes where he does not demand change *yet*, but ask them to share their views on this, due the technical issues involved.
Complaint 6. DRM; he goes on a bit of rant here, and then lists a few laws they may be violating, and asks them for feedback.
Mark you, this is not our ombudsmann, which is someone appointed to help us against the goverment, but our consumer-ombudsmann who helps against corporations:). If you're Norwegian, I really do recommend reading it here (pdf). It's very well written and extremely insightfull. The main-stream press coverage does not do it justice at all.
Your stance kind of seems like saying "I like to write email but I don't believe in dictionaries"
Yes, provided correct spelling would be an hinderance to actually understanding my emails (like if I insisted on a 15-century British Dictionary being correct).. and yes, just as with people hating XML, it's the misuse that's making me hate it. I mean, that follows pretty much from the definition of 'misuse':)
I'm sorry, but that number is slightly scewed, and it's partly my companys fault.
You see, we have these ridicilously large spreadsheets which are really boring, and in order to improve morale Marketing deciding to add 'Pink Font Colour' as a critical requirement. Naturally, this requirement was 'overlooked' so we ended up sending in large amounts of spreadsheets with critical errors on every single cell; even the empty ones.
>p>
What happended? Now, the accounts didn't mind the pink colour, as they're all colourblind anyways; the only reaction there was one guy sighing and turning up the contrast on his monitor. The engineers didn't mind too much either, as the pink colour faintly reminded them of somebody, and the fleeting sensation really did bring some joy into their lives before they were wipped back to work.
The problem was of course with the web-designers. Two of them plain suicided when they saw the colours, while several others ran around screaming for hours.. Naturally, they started a project to change all the colours back. Being web-designers, they did this one cell at the time. Luckily they did get finished in time for our spreadsheets to be part of this survey.. it only took 20 men two weeks.
Class diagrams are ubiquitous these days, and I can't come up with a better way to show program flow than a sequence diagram.
Don't confuse UML with Class Diagrams and Flow Charts, as I was using them long before I had ever heard of UML; the concepts really are intuitive and self-explanatory. Ditching UML doesn't mean ditching them, it just means ditching the specific UML standard and use something sane instead..
.. which everybody kinda seem to be doing anyways. Mostly everybody I've seen using "UML" diagrams when actually working are basically using boxes, connecting them with a few arrows and scribbling explanatory notes here and there. The few times I've seen valid UML diagrams they confused the **** out of me, as they're usually written by anal-retentive people who really, really enjoy showing off how good they are knowing useless stuff. I know a standard needs to be precise and all, but it's all a matter of what you need right there and then.
I think it's more than proportional, acually. For every piece of luggage you want to put up there, you need some amount of energy.
On the other hand, air-resistance grows less than proportionally with weight, although I guess that's less by several factors...
.. damn I wish I had done more actual physics calculations. I don't have any sense of proportion:/
In Europe, the concept of privacy doesn't include the government. Yes, they have strong laws dictating how data is used, kept, stored and brokered so as to prevent misuse by third parties, individuals and corporations. But, they have no real protections about government access and use to all that data. All in the name of paternalistic government, enacted thru "anti-terror", "anti-drug" and "immigration control" laws the gov'ts of Europe have no privacy when it comes to bureaucratic eyes.
In America the right to Free Speech is only from Goverment, which is equally absurd in my/our eyes.
I guess it all comes down to whatever you fear the most; corporations or governments?
Governments are limited by geography here (atleast for now), corporations aren't. When Americans are talking about 'government' in discussions like these they're next to always referring to the big one in Washington and seldom their states.. Well, our big one is the 'EU', and while it's certainly scaring me long-term, it's still a toothless tiger.
Does this mean I as a man can now go into woman's bathrooms and showers and such?
Yes, but while getting your ass kicked by angry, naked women might sound fun at first, I think you'll sound change your opinion when everything starts to hurt...
..... bloody womens liberation!
(Not to mention, depending on country, a fair amount of the women will be significantly larger than you (and by larger, i really do mean fatter).. and naked..)
I know, a byte is 8 bits, but as a rule of thumb, dividing by 10 seems to include overhead.
Overhead in converting from bits to bytes?:)
Application-level measurement of bandwidth is of course actual data free of padding (since the padding is done by a lower networklayer, it's completely transparent).
From linked blog: In order to access Snow's site, a user was required to register a username and password, and to agree to a statement affirming that the user was not associated with DirecTV, inc
So, in order to access the site, you had to register. If asking the user is not considered 'no effective meaure' what the hell is? Does this mean we can all ignore EULA's too, since the companies are taking 'no effective measures' besides an 'I agree' button? I mean, seriously, this sort of logic will certainly make a lot of things easier to handle:
'Yes, I know I signed the contract with a false name, but what measures did the other party really take to keep me honest? If they're relying on me not lying, it's clearly their own fault they got burnt.'
"Your honour, I know the defendant asked me to stop punching him, but he didn't take any effective counter-measures so I figured it was really alright to continue "
However, as the main goal of the pirate bay is to facilitate copyright infringement, I find it very hard to believe that none of these guys had any illegal copies of stuff at home, on their laptops, etc.
Exactly due to the risks involved, I'm willing to bet quite alot they kept their own computers clean.
Even if they had stuff on their own computers, I'm very unsure if they actually could be charged. I imagine Sweden, as Norway, have pretty stricts laws on how police can gather information, and in which situations the information gathered can be used. After all, we don't want any random policeman with a grudge to be able to ruin somebodies life.
Slashdot Mirror
How to get a work-permit (pretty much boils down to 'get a job'):
http://www.udi.no/templates/Tema.aspx?id=4479
Funcom (Anarchy Online, Longest Journey, Conan) is located in Oslo, they are hiring and English is their working language. Same goes for Opera (english, hiring and located in Oslo), but they generally pay really shit. I have no idea whether it's possible to get by at Trolltech (QT) without knowing Norwegian.. else I think there's employment in the oil industry where the working language is English (although quite often, this means you work three weeks at a rig, and then have two weeks off. The pay is ridicously good though).
Other than that, all the Scandinivian langauges are quite easy to pick up. We basically use english sentence structure, german words and our own pronounciation. Alot of the sounds are quite hard for Americans to get completely right, so you're going to sound like a foreigner a looong time, but for the most part, you only need to understand what we say in Norwegian; as long as you speak clearly everybody will understand everything you say in English; always (we hear English daily through TV, but most people *never* speak it).
Lack of belligerence? I told you to the stop the sanctimonious crap for gods sake, if that's not being belligerent, what is?
Just to make it clear, as you probably understood (since you didn't swear at me:), my comment was more out of general frustration than than any specific gripe with the review (which was well-written).
1. I live in a crazy socialist country where we believe in equal opportunities regardless of who your parents are, so education is free'ish here. So, I might not understand that aspect of American insanity too well :). He's welcome to move here though, there's *plenty* of room.
2. If you're young with small children you're probably at the point in life where you're at your poorest, have the most stuff you want to do (family vacations ftw!) and the most need for free time to spend with your budding family. Trying to save money at this stage really is, well, stupid.. besides, as you grow more experienced and get better at what you to, you will earn more money. Premature saving is like premature optimization, a bloody waste of effort :)
3. Money now is more worth now than later. When you were 5 100$ was a fortune, and when you were 20 5000$ was a fortune. Although this slows down, this trend continues. Spending the money you actually have *now* is in the majority of cases the best of maximizing your moneyquality-of-life exchange rate.
4. Most families have two cars and shitloads of crap. If you're worried about the future, get cheaper cars, a cheaper house and stop buying crap. Minimizing your expenses is as important as maximizing your incomce, and can usually be done with far smaller impact in your quality of life (barring potentially ruining your ability to gather useless crap). (and if you're wondering what I'm referring to as useless crap, just take *one* look in your garage and your kitchen, or if you're young still, your parents'. How much of that stuff did you really need?)
5. Saving money is nice and all, but don't let the future ruin the present. Being miserable now in order to potentially avoid misery later really only means maximizing the potential amount of misery. If you can do it while not ruining your life, sure, go ahead. If you can't; well.. don't!
6. How many people do you know that's had their quality of life significantly reduced by having parents that were too poor (but still decent hard-working, stable and loving)? How many people do you know that's have severe scars from their childhood due parents not being there for them? Focusing on giving your kids stuff is easy, being their friends and whatever is easy, but it has never, and will never, be what they need, nor will it ever be what they will be thankfull for when they grow up.
As an exercise in full disclosure, I should confess to hosting two podcast series of my own, the AwareTek philosophical podcast, and the Python411 podcast about the Python programming language."
Full disclosure?! You sir, are going to be a good politician some day. Using a term which still has good connotations due to not being misused enough yet, and spinning your own shameless commercials as doing the readers a favour. Bloody hell!
Not that I think there's any wrong with plugging your own stuff at the end of a review, but for god's sake, be honest about it and avoid the self-sanctimonius crap!
In other words, you're ridicously fit and extremly bad at playing computer games?
Come again? You are two people working; You don't need long work-days. You don't need jobs with good pay, you need jobs with adequate pay. Seriously, find regular 8-hour work, preferably close to where you live.
I mean, maybe you'll drop 20-30% in pay in the process, but you'll have time to actually enjoy life and actually meet your family.. and sleep occasionally :). Work is for getting for money you can spend on your freetime. Work is not your life.
The Wii-equivalent of 'Mount and Blade' would utterly, utterly rock (M&B is a simple down-to-earth fighting game RPG'ish which gets simple fight-dynamics sooo right)
Why?
Me hitting the letter "e" will probably not take the same amount of energy to process twice. But I bet over 1000 e's the standard deviation could be found and would indicate that 66% of the time it's "x J +/- y" and so on...
But with different usage-patterns you *will* get consinstant differences..so sure, you'd get data, and they'd be valid, but that doesn't mean GP needs a stat-class. Regardless of how much people refuse to believe it, even in todays 'massage-the-data-until-you-find-something(anythin g-will-do)'-world, the ol' trusted "garbage in, garbage out" still holds.
Hard for you to know, but the entire EULA is available in Norwegian (albeit quite horrible Norwegian, but lawyer-speak never was any good in any language). His complaint was concerning the actual iTunes store, where only parts of it (client-side) is availabel in Norwegian.
While I originally thought this to be a non-issue, I had to give in on it. The problem is that the EULA specifically demands for you to check the iTunes store for policy-changes, so actually understanding the text on the store actually becomes a necessity (as opposed to using it for shopping, which you really don't need to understand much english to do).
Either way, it's still kinda a non-issue, as most Norwegians have quite decent vocabularies and read English completely fluently (all movies are shown on English here). We may have a little trouble speaking English since we for some reason speak Norwegian to eachother constantly (hence some people being under the miscomprehension that we're 'bad' at English.. we just need a few minutes to switch), but we'll understand pretty much everything (Films without subtitles are generally ok, as long as there's not too much mumbling). In fact, I've met one person my entire life who wasn't functional in English and that's my Grandfather who dropped out of school when he was 12 :)
Congratulations; I think you managed to sum up everything that's wrong with America... completely unindended too :(
(for the dim: neither of these shouldhave been controversial in any way)
.. or link to their own blogs?
Yes, but if FBI agents start amassing in groups outside your house reading and pointing at your sign there's something wrong.
Many actions, especially many of those performed by the government has to be judged more by their potential for misuse than for their potential use.
First and foremost; the whole problem here is that iTunes is specifically targetting the Norwegian market, as only Norwegians are allowed to use the Norwegian version of iTunes. This clearly sets it apart from most other net-stores which counts as *imports*. There is no doubt whatsoever that Norwegian laws apply here and this is probably a large reason why iTunes is being singled out. Forbrukerombudet (ombudsmann as you wrongly named him:)) did however note that several other services would be targetted soon (he lists a couple of music stores, but I can't find it now)
Complaint 1:
In order for a contract to be valid under Norwegian contract law it has to be two-sided; that is outline both responsibilties and priviligies. The iTunes EULA is completely one-sided completely failing to provide you with any benefits whatsoever. They do not accept any responsibilities nor guarantee anything.
Complaint 2:
The language itself is unclear. It does not define what 'service' as so far non-liability concerning downtime means. Does it means the store, the player, the DRM, etc? Added to this, all the terms are not available in Norwegian (which frankly, is pretty much the only point he makes I think is a non-issue).
Complaint 3:
Their attempts at disallowing non-Norwegian credits-cards for use at Norwegian iTunes is against the European Free Trade Agreement (EFTA).
Complaint 4:
Their attempt at having the right to change the contract/terms at any time whatsoever is clearly not allowed by Norwegian law. At the most extreme, if the iTunes EULA was valid they could instantly revoke your music without you having any say.
Complaint 5:
No return-policy. This is required by Norwegian law; however this is one of several points he makes where he does not demand change *yet*, but ask them to share their views on this, due the technical issues involved.
Complaint 6.
DRM; he goes on a bit of rant here, and then lists a few laws they may be violating, and asks them for feedback.
Mark you, this is not our ombudsmann, which is someone appointed to help us against the goverment, but our consumer-ombudsmann who helps against corporations :). If you're Norwegian, I really do recommend reading it here (pdf). It's very well written and extremely insightfull. The main-stream press coverage does not do it justice at all.
Yes, provided correct spelling would be an hinderance to actually understanding my emails (like if I insisted on a 15-century British Dictionary being correct).. and yes, just as with people hating XML, it's the misuse that's making me hate it. I mean, that follows pretty much from the definition of 'misuse' :)
I had several sarcastic remarks about mobiles in the US, GSM and the utter lack of knowledge behind your post. I gave up choosing which one to use :)
You see, we have these ridicilously large spreadsheets which are really boring, and in order to improve morale Marketing deciding to add 'Pink Font Colour' as a critical requirement. Naturally, this requirement was 'overlooked' so we ended up sending in large amounts of spreadsheets with critical errors on every single cell; even the empty ones. >p> What happended? Now, the accounts didn't mind the pink colour, as they're all colourblind anyways; the only reaction there was one guy sighing and turning up the contrast on his monitor. The engineers didn't mind too much either, as the pink colour faintly reminded them of somebody, and the fleeting sensation really did bring some joy into their lives before they were wipped back to work.
The problem was of course with the web-designers. Two of them plain suicided when they saw the colours, while several others ran around screaming for hours.. Naturally, they started a project to change all the colours back. Being web-designers, they did this one cell at the time. Luckily they did get finished in time for our spreadsheets to be part of this survey.. it only took 20 men two weeks.
Don't confuse UML with Class Diagrams and Flow Charts, as I was using them long before I had ever heard of UML; the concepts really are intuitive and self-explanatory. Ditching UML doesn't mean ditching them, it just means ditching the specific UML standard and use something sane instead..
On the other hand, air-resistance grows less than proportionally with weight, although I guess that's less by several factors...
.. damn I wish I had done more actual physics calculations. I don't have any sense of proportion :/
So sure, once you get liquid hydrogen from the moon / some other energy source it'd be usefull.. which pretty much means we need a moonbase first.
In America the right to Free Speech is only from Goverment, which is equally absurd in my/our eyes.
I guess it all comes down to whatever you fear the most; corporations or governments?
Governments are limited by geography here (atleast for now), corporations aren't. When Americans are talking about 'government' in discussions like these they're next to always referring to the big one in Washington and seldom their states.. Well, our big one is the 'EU', and while it's certainly scaring me long-term, it's still a toothless tiger.
Yes, but while getting your ass kicked by angry, naked women might sound fun at first, I think you'll sound change your opinion when everything starts to hurt...
..... bloody womens liberation!
(Not to mention, depending on country, a fair amount of the women will be significantly larger than you (and by larger, i really do mean fatter).. and naked..)
Overhead in converting from bits to bytes? :)
Application-level measurement of bandwidth is of course actual data free of padding (since the padding is done by a lower networklayer, it's completely transparent).
In order to access Snow's site, a user was required to register a username and password, and to agree to a statement affirming that the user was not associated with DirecTV, inc
So, in order to access the site, you had to register. If asking the user is not considered 'no effective meaure' what the hell is? Does this mean we can all ignore EULA's too, since the companies are taking 'no effective measures' besides an 'I agree' button? I mean, seriously, this sort of logic will certainly make a lot of things easier to handle:
'Yes, I know I signed the contract with a false name, but what measures did the other party really take to keep me honest? If they're relying on me not lying, it's clearly their own fault they got burnt.'
"Your honour, I know the defendant asked me to stop punching him, but he didn't take any effective counter-measures so I figured it was really alright to continue "
Exactly due to the risks involved, I'm willing to bet quite alot they kept their own computers clean.
Even if they had stuff on their own computers, I'm very unsure if they actually could be charged. I imagine Sweden, as Norway, have pretty stricts laws on how police can gather information, and in which situations the information gathered can be used. After all, we don't want any random policeman with a grudge to be able to ruin somebodies life.