I recently left Seattle after 4 years, and I hail from Ottawa. I remember about 10 years ago Seattle/Vancouver had something like 60 days of overcast weather-- highest suicide rates that year.
I really didn't think the weather was affecting me significantly until I moved to Salt Lake City. Almost immediately my energy level went up, I was sleeping better, my focus was through the roof. Now I know it's also situational (going from a cube farm to start up as well as a change in my personal life), but under no circumstance am I moving back to Seattle.
A couple of months ago, I noticed that Facebook started telling me that I needed to turn on Javascript, even though I had facebook.com in my allow list in NoScript. I noticed that there was now a second server required, http://www.fbcdn.net/ (I checked CIRA's WhoIs and facebook.ca was snatched up by someone else in 2005). I was recently in the states, so I disallowed fbcdn.net in NoScript (just to see), and there were no complains about my Javascript setting until I returned north of the border.
This seems to imply that there are separate servers running for Canadians accessing Facebook, so at a minimum, that would give some leverage into forcing them to follow Canada's rules. Now, if those servers are physically located in Canada (no, I haven't bothered doing a traceroute to find out where fbcdn.net ends up), that would definitely force them to follow those rules.
Slightly OT, but in my current job and we recently went looking for a new hosting company to host our database (which has a fair amount of private data in it). Because my company gets a large amount of our budget for the federal and provincial governments (it's a non-profit) we like to abide by as many of the federal government rules when it comes to IT and data privacy. One of those rules is any private data must only be hosted in Canada and it can not leave the country. A few companies came to us as "the Canadian branch of hosting company X". The conversations went like this: Me: Where are your datacenters? Them: We have them all over the world. Me: Ok, but in which of those datacenters is our data going to be physically hosted? Them: We can do distributed hosting so it's in many different datacenters Me: Yes or no, Are these datacenters in Canadian territory? Them: Me: So, I'll take that as a no, which means that you know we can't host with you because of the government ruling about hosting private data outside the country. Them: Me:
More and more Canadian companies are taking the approach of hosting only in Canada, if only to ensure that they know the rules for data privacy and know there won't be a conflict between Canada's and the other country's.
I just bought a 4G (with free carrying case!) this past Thursday from a local small computer store (that I have been a regular at for over 10 years). I asked the owner what the mark up is on the system and he told me that ASUS sells them to him at 379$ and if he wants to sell them at a price other than 399$, he needs to get written permission from them 14 days in advance. He can't even have a sale for them at 389$ without telling them and getting permission 14 days before the sale, in his words "it's not worth the effort just to cut my profit in half."
What he did mention is that ASUS gives him a quarterly kick back for ever 50 machines he sells, 5000$, and for every 20 2GB memory upgrades, 2000$. As an FYI, the 2GB memory upgrade cost me 50$ and they're not allowed to charge the customers labor in order for it to qualify. Same goes for the various accessories, but he didn't mention what he gets on those, I assume it's comparable. He figured they'd be doing the same with XP when it came available.
Regardless, I installed the Advanced Desktop via apt-get as soon as I got home Thursday night, and have not missed the EEE's default custom desktop one bit.
I noticed my dad (also 58) jumped on the Facebook bandwagon a few weeks ago (for "geneology purposes only" apparently)... but he won't confirm me as his daughter. I wonder if he's hinting at something.
I am the IT department for a 25 person non-profit (some days are better than others) and what I did for my users was write a simple BAT script that uses XCOPY (/EXCLUDE/Y/S/D/Z ) to copy select folders to everyone's personal network drive (which gets backed up nightly).
At first it was part of the login script - but that didn't last long, people were not too happy waiting 10 minutes to log in in the morning while their PST file is copied up to the network drive (we don't have Exchange). Instead I posted the file on the shared network drive and put shortcuts on everyone's desktop. I have a scheduled reminder email I sent out once a month that says nothing more than "when was the last time you backed up your laptop?" and I remind them verbally before they go on vacation and business trips. Most people run the script before they head out for lunch or let it run overnight.
I ended up with 5 different versions of the file (just because user x doesn't save to his My docs, he saves to a "work stuff" folder instead). Over time, and laptop failures, I've expanded the script to grab some settings and profile folders too (bookmarks, quick launch, and I do a "dir/s" to a text file of their start menu and program files so I know what programs would have to be reinstalled in case of a failure).
Anyone who's taken the tour at the Mint in Ottawa (it's pretty nifty) knows those coins are something they boast about quite heavily. The people leading the tours I've been on, said the printed coins (be it the red poppy available only through Tim Horton's at the time or the pink ribbon through Shoppers Drug Mart and RBC) are a world first. Here's the CBC article from 2004 first announcing them.
Why not use the included Google quick search? Ctrl-L to the address bar the type in "google " followed by a space, then what you want to search for. In version 1.0 there's also Wikipedia ("wp"). I can't even remember the last time I saw the google.ca homepage.
And you can always create your own quick searches too.
College and university are structured differently up here in the Great Canadian North.
Going to university teaches you the high level and broader theory on subjects. When you graduate from a university, you're better suited for a project leader type position. Or the role of proffesional student as the case may be. Total cost: about 10 000$ a semester (or more depending on where you are), and anywhere from 6 to 10 semesters depending on what you do with your time while there.
Whereas going to college means you're learning a trade. You get to be the guy (or gal) in the cubicle spewing out the code for your university-grad project manager who only knows how things work in theory, and doesn't understand why their pretty UML diagram won't work for our setup (but I'm not bitter). Total cost: less than 10 000$ for the diploma as a whole.
I recently graduated from a Canadian college, I know the basic idea behind the algorithms I use, the languages I can program in (and why they were developped). The college is constantly (ok, every two to three years) reworking the program to meet the needs of the local market. When Nortel was huge and into Perl, so there were three Perl courses, when I went through Nortel was already suffering and we only had a brief overview of Perl. Now the local market's looking towards Java and.NET, so that's what we learned. The college experience has taught me how to learn a language and use it effectively based on "good" programming practices. I have some friends who started their heigher education by taking CompSci at university and complained they barely wrote any code, that's why they came to college.
This being a university level course, it's teaching the theory to these stupid. Maybe in the hopes they'll become effective project leaders if ever handed a situation where their company is being affected spamed in one method or another.
Besides, I was told by the Dean of my school at the college "get your diploma, go work somewhere for a few years, then get them to pay for your degree, by then you'll want to know why things work the way they do."
I picked up Donkey Konga for my roomies and I to unwind with (they all ended up buying their own drums, it's not as much fun with the controller). It's our third night having it in the house and needless to say, it's now 8 hours from when we started playing today and we were still having fun until the neighbours asked us to try keep it down. Our palms may be bright red and swollen, the cats may be scared of us, the neighbours think we're insane, the Sims 2 are sitting neglected, but we'll be right back signing and dancing with our drums tomorrow.
Opening retail outlets isn't a new tactic for Sony. Here where I live, I can think of two Sony Stores - one of which has been open for at least two years and I think the other one even longer. In the mall I work in part-time, I'm constantly giving people directions to the Sony Store.
Now, if only they taught their sales associates to help customers *before* they're at the cash...
Personally I use the ATI Remote Wonder [www.ATI.com]. Primarily meant as a remote for their TV tunners, but has media support none the less. The receiver plugs into the USB port and the transmissions are all done via RF, so no need to worry about line of sight.
I like the fact it has a direction pad for controlling the mouse and the media playback buttons, and four programmable buttons. There are plugins available for PowerPoint and WinAmp, personally I don't have them installed but the device still works fine. The fact I can be in the kitchen making dinner, changing the tunes on my PC on another level of the house is always nice too.
I got mine to use with my TV card about 8 months ago, and it's still on the original batteries that came in the box.
I'm also taking a COBOL course while on my Co-op term (I'm in CompSci). My Co-op term's with one of the "big" government departments who still have millions+ lines of COBOL code in use. I happened to ask my supervisor if I could install the compiler to my desktop (in order to work on my assignments over my lunch). My group within the department doesn't do any COBOL programming, or any programming at all (unless InstallShield counts as programming).
The next day, my supervisor asked how much my course was and to bring in a copy of my receipt from the college. On my next pay check I had a "Learning Bonus" the exact cost of my course. My next coop term (which will starting in May) is in the proccess of being arranged in the programming shop -- all because they need people to convert and maintain the old code (all the people who wrote the COBOL in the first place have either:
a. moved on to bigger and better places in the deptarment.
-or-
b. took the nice early retirement bundle that was handed out a few years back.)
Programming COBOL may not be fun, but atleast I'll be starting in a programming position, not answering the phone at a helpdesk. Lest we forget: government does have a whole lot more stability than private industry.
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I recently left Seattle after 4 years, and I hail from Ottawa. I remember about 10 years ago Seattle/Vancouver had something like 60 days of overcast weather-- highest suicide rates that year. I really didn't think the weather was affecting me significantly until I moved to Salt Lake City. Almost immediately my energy level went up, I was sleeping better, my focus was through the roof. Now I know it's also situational (going from a cube farm to start up as well as a change in my personal life), but under no circumstance am I moving back to Seattle.
A couple of months ago, I noticed that Facebook started telling me that I needed to turn on Javascript, even though I had facebook.com in my allow list in NoScript. I noticed that there was now a second server required, http://www.fbcdn.net/ (I checked CIRA's WhoIs and facebook.ca was snatched up by someone else in 2005). I was recently in the states, so I disallowed fbcdn.net in NoScript (just to see), and there were no complains about my Javascript setting until I returned north of the border.
This seems to imply that there are separate servers running for Canadians accessing Facebook, so at a minimum, that would give some leverage into forcing them to follow Canada's rules. Now, if those servers are physically located in Canada (no, I haven't bothered doing a traceroute to find out where fbcdn.net ends up), that would definitely force them to follow those rules.
Slightly OT, but in my current job and we recently went looking for a new hosting company to host our database (which has a fair amount of private data in it). Because my company gets a large amount of our budget for the federal and provincial governments (it's a non-profit) we like to abide by as many of the federal government rules when it comes to IT and data privacy. One of those rules is any private data must only be hosted in Canada and it can not leave the country. A few companies came to us as "the Canadian branch of hosting company X". The conversations went like this:
Me: Where are your datacenters?
Them: We have them all over the world.
Me: Ok, but in which of those datacenters is our data going to be physically hosted?
Them: We can do distributed hosting so it's in many different datacenters
Me: Yes or no, Are these datacenters in Canadian territory?
Them:
Me: So, I'll take that as a no, which means that you know we can't host with you because of the government ruling about hosting private data outside the country.
Them:
Me:
More and more Canadian companies are taking the approach of hosting only in Canada, if only to ensure that they know the rules for data privacy and know there won't be a conflict between Canada's and the other country's.
I'm also curious about the price.
I just bought a 4G (with free carrying case!) this past Thursday from a local small computer store (that I have been a regular at for over 10 years). I asked the owner what the mark up is on the system and he told me that ASUS sells them to him at 379$ and if he wants to sell them at a price other than 399$, he needs to get written permission from them 14 days in advance. He can't even have a sale for them at 389$ without telling them and getting permission 14 days before the sale, in his words "it's not worth the effort just to cut my profit in half."
What he did mention is that ASUS gives him a quarterly kick back for ever 50 machines he sells, 5000$, and for every 20 2GB memory upgrades, 2000$. As an FYI, the 2GB memory upgrade cost me 50$ and they're not allowed to charge the customers labor in order for it to qualify. Same goes for the various accessories, but he didn't mention what he gets on those, I assume it's comparable. He figured they'd be doing the same with XP when it came available.
Regardless, I installed the Advanced Desktop via apt-get as soon as I got home Thursday night, and have not missed the EEE's default custom desktop one bit.
Note: all prices are in CAD
I noticed my dad (also 58) jumped on the Facebook bandwagon a few weeks ago (for "geneology purposes only" apparently) ... but he won't confirm me as his daughter. I wonder if he's hinting at something.
I am the IT department for a 25 person non-profit (some days are better than others) and what I did for my users was write a simple BAT script that uses XCOPY (/EXCLUDE /Y /S /D /Z ) to copy select folders to everyone's personal network drive (which gets backed up nightly).
/s" to a text file of their start menu and program files so I know what programs would have to be reinstalled in case of a failure).
At first it was part of the login script - but that didn't last long, people were not too happy waiting 10 minutes to log in in the morning while their PST file is copied up to the network drive (we don't have Exchange). Instead I posted the file on the shared network drive and put shortcuts on everyone's desktop. I have a scheduled reminder email I sent out once a month that says nothing more than "when was the last time you backed up your laptop?" and I remind them verbally before they go on vacation and business trips. Most people run the script before they head out for lunch or let it run overnight.
I ended up with 5 different versions of the file (just because user x doesn't save to his My docs, he saves to a "work stuff" folder instead). Over time, and laptop failures, I've expanded the script to grab some settings and profile folders too (bookmarks, quick launch, and I do a "dir
Anyone who's taken the tour at the Mint in Ottawa (it's pretty nifty) knows those coins are something they boast about quite heavily. The people leading the tours I've been on, said the printed coins (be it the red poppy available only through Tim Horton's at the time or the pink ribbon through Shoppers Drug Mart and RBC) are a world first. Here's the CBC article from 2004 first announcing them.
Why not use the included Google quick search? Ctrl-L to the address bar the type in "google " followed by a space, then what you want to search for. In version 1.0 there's also Wikipedia ("wp"). I can't even remember the last time I saw the google.ca homepage.
And you can always create your own quick searches too.
College and university are structured differently up here in the Great Canadian North.
.NET, so that's what we learned. The college experience has taught me how to learn a language and use it effectively based on "good" programming practices. I have some friends who started their heigher education by taking CompSci at university and complained they barely wrote any code, that's why they came to college.
Going to university teaches you the high level and broader theory on subjects. When you graduate from a university, you're better suited for a project leader type position. Or the role of proffesional student as the case may be. Total cost: about 10 000$ a semester (or more depending on where you are), and anywhere from 6 to 10 semesters depending on what you do with your time while there.
Whereas going to college means you're learning a trade. You get to be the guy (or gal) in the cubicle spewing out the code for your university-grad project manager who only knows how things work in theory, and doesn't understand why their pretty UML diagram won't work for our setup (but I'm not bitter). Total cost: less than 10 000$ for the diploma as a whole.
I recently graduated from a Canadian college, I know the basic idea behind the algorithms I use, the languages I can program in (and why they were developped). The college is constantly (ok, every two to three years) reworking the program to meet the needs of the local market. When Nortel was huge and into Perl, so there were three Perl courses, when I went through Nortel was already suffering and we only had a brief overview of Perl. Now the local market's looking towards Java and
This being a university level course, it's teaching the theory to these stupid. Maybe in the hopes they'll become effective project leaders if ever handed a situation where their company is being affected spamed in one method or another.
Besides, I was told by the Dean of my school at the college "get your diploma, go work somewhere for a few years, then get them to pay for your degree, by then you'll want to know why things work the way they do."
I picked up Donkey Konga for my roomies and I to unwind with (they all ended up buying their own drums, it's not as much fun with the controller). It's our third night having it in the house and needless to say, it's now 8 hours from when we started playing today and we were still having fun until the neighbours asked us to try keep it down. Our palms may be bright red and swollen, the cats may be scared of us, the neighbours think we're insane, the Sims 2 are sitting neglected, but we'll be right back signing and dancing with our drums tomorrow.
...And it makes a great drink-along game.
... add Lycos to that list too.
Opening retail outlets isn't a new tactic for Sony. Here where I live, I can think of two Sony Stores - one of which has been open for at least two years and I think the other one even longer. In the mall I work in part-time, I'm constantly giving people directions to the Sony Store. Now, if only they taught their sales associates to help customers *before* they're at the cash ...
Personally I use the ATI Remote Wonder [www.ATI.com]. Primarily meant as a remote for their TV tunners, but has media support none the less. The receiver plugs into the USB port and the transmissions are all done via RF, so no need to worry about line of sight.
I like the fact it has a direction pad for controlling the mouse and the media playback buttons, and four programmable buttons. There are plugins available for PowerPoint and WinAmp, personally I don't have them installed but the device still works fine. The fact I can be in the kitchen making dinner, changing the tunes on my PC on another level of the house is always nice too.
I got mine to use with my TV card about 8 months ago, and it's still on the original batteries that came in the box.
I'm also taking a COBOL course while on my Co-op term (I'm in CompSci). My Co-op term's with one of the "big" government departments who still have millions+ lines of COBOL code in use. I happened to ask my supervisor if I could install the compiler to my desktop (in order to work on my assignments over my lunch). My group within the department doesn't do any COBOL programming, or any programming at all (unless InstallShield counts as programming).
The next day, my supervisor asked how much my course was and to bring in a copy of my receipt from the college. On my next pay check I had a "Learning Bonus" the exact cost of my course. My next coop term (which will starting in May) is in the proccess of being arranged in the programming shop -- all because they need people to convert and maintain the old code (all the people who wrote the COBOL in the first place have either:
a. moved on to bigger and better places in the deptarment.
-or-
b. took the nice early retirement bundle that was handed out a few years back.)
Programming COBOL may not be fun, but atleast I'll be starting in a programming position, not answering the phone at a helpdesk. Lest we forget: government does have a whole lot more stability than private industry.