That concept is so pathetic I don't know where to begin. Consumer protection agencies to fine a restaurant for poor quality and bad treatment? Are Europeans that big of pussies?
So in your part of the world you don't have agencies that inspect restaurants and fine them if they're health standards aren't up to scratch?
The format for PDF is an open standard, and anybody can implement it (and it says so in the PDF specs)... so I wonder how Adobe could object legally? I guess they are just afraid of loosing sales of Acrobat Pro, which has been getting prohibitively more expensive with each release (and each release itself hasn't exactly been a compelling upgrade).
When I started programming many, many years ago, it was for teh Acorn Atom, and later the BBC Micro... both of which had a 6502 at their heart. I remember earning assembler for it, and having oodles of fun once I grokked it. Its a shame that the processor didn't go further, but I guess you could say the Acorn ARM was its natural successor, since many people migrated from the BBC MIcro into the Acron Archimedes and its ARM CPU (which then disappeared into the embedded world).
Linux comes with approximately a zillion different keyboard layouts so you should be able to find what you need there. If you're stuck with Windows, sorry...
Yeah... but that's not much use when the keys themselves have been engraved with a different layout.
Nowadays, I always find myself forced to go to some vendors regional webpage which is not accessible in a language I understand due to the underlying (and horribly outdated) assumption that everyone is born, lives and dies in one tiny geographic area, from which they never move, and that they only are able to speak the "official" language used in that area.
So true, and so annoying.
Where I live, vendors sell computers with AZERTY or QWERTZ keyboards... but I want QWERTY since its a hell of a lot easier to program using a US layout... and don't even get me started about only being able to pick up an OS that is localized into a language NOT of my choice (even though there is no practical reason why the OS can't be supplied with all localized languages. (Note that OS X does come with all localizations as standard, unlike XP, et al)
The problem as I see is it that vendors and retailers still think of the world as individual countries with their own languages and, more importantly price structures... which is a polite way of saying they can and do get away with selling the same stuff in different countries with different prices (using localization as the excuse for different prices)... look at the whole region encoding on DVDs, which attempts to stop you buying DVDs from elsewhere which may be cheaper/better than whats on offer in your own region.
Just had a lunch in Zurich at Movenpick today. The VAT was explicitly printed on the bill, so it was clear how much of the price the tax was.
That's how things work in Europe... sales invoices/bill have to show how much VAT has been charged.
However when I ordered the salad and coffee the prices on the menu were final
Again, that's how things work in Europe. Prices show are always inclusive of VAT, because you, the customer, will be charged VAT (and as you are a consumer you can't claim back this tax because its a consumer-oriented tax). Its only when dealing with b2b that prices shown are net of VAT, because business don't pay VAT (or rather, they claim it back when buying from within their own country or don't have to pay it when buying from another EU country).
Unless you have a public key for the recipient, you can only send signed mail... when they reply to your signed mail they can then encrypt their response and give you their public key (and from then on you can send encrypted mail to them).
I think we're living in a nanny state where there is far to much of somebody else telling people what they should or should not listen to or watch.
Now what would be more useful would be an option to have the bleeping/muting/whatever done by your set top box rather than in the broadcast audio... that way, you can simply have an option to hear the original audio, or have the censored version for those with delicate ears. FWIW, I hate it when broadcasters censor words out... watching something as innocent as 2 and-a-half-men is a right pain when even things like "ass" as muted... that god they don't try it with South Park.
I was raised on HH, which seems to overshadow anything else that Douglas did, but I have a special fondness for Dirk Gently, and just wish there could have been more of it... sure, it was different from HH, but there was a certain Douglassness about it.
I travel a lot within the EU and my phone gets bombarded with SMSs as I switch between different carriers outside my home country informing me how much it costs to send (national calls) or receive calls (inbound roaming).
Its not also the bosses that are at fault, just look at any of the recruitment agencies and you get the same lack of knowledge and the quest to get somebody who can tick all the requirement boxes (especially if the requirements are *impossible* to get, like the infamous 5 or 10 years experience with X where X has only been out 1 or 2 years).
As an alpha geek, I've also moved over to a Mac.
I've spent most of my professional life using and programming Windows. I've got Linux (Gentoo) based servers, and a Linux (Gentoo) workstation for development. However, I love the Mac. It offers the best of both worlds: a slick GUI, and a unix-system under the hood.
Interestingly, when I first turned up at work with my Mac Book, I took a lot of flack from the Windows people... but after a few months more and more of them were considering moving to the Mac, primarily because "It Just Works". I've recently changed jobs and in the new place I've been amazed how many of the programmers there have Macs at home.
There is still a bit of imperial stuff in Europe... I recently installed a water osmosis system (from a French company) and had oodles of fun plumbing it into my water system... one of the connectors wasn't metric but imperial, so I had to rush down to the local hardware store and get an adaptor (which was a wonderful bit of turned brass with an metric thread on one side and an imperial thread on the other).
IIRC all the valves (that's taps or faucets to the uninitiated) came only with imperial threads... not a metric one in sight.
Visual SourceSafe went through a few more (minor) release cycles... and while Microoft will quite happily sell you Visual SourceSafe 6.0, internally it was dropped and they've been using something else internally for years (and again that was an external system... the name of which I forget).
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That concept is so pathetic I don't know where to begin. Consumer protection agencies to fine a restaurant for poor quality and bad treatment? Are Europeans that big of pussies?
So in your part of the world you don't have agencies that inspect restaurants and fine them if they're health standards aren't up to scratch?
The format for PDF is an open standard, and anybody can implement it (and it says so in the PDF specs)... so I wonder how Adobe could object legally? I guess they are just afraid of loosing sales of Acrobat Pro, which has been getting prohibitively more expensive with each release (and each release itself hasn't exactly been a compelling upgrade).
When I started programming many, many years ago, it was for teh Acorn Atom, and later the BBC Micro... both of which had a 6502 at their heart. I remember earning assembler for it, and having oodles of fun once I grokked it. Its a shame that the processor didn't go further, but I guess you could say the Acorn ARM was its natural successor, since many people migrated from the BBC MIcro into the Acron Archimedes and its ARM CPU (which then disappeared into the embedded world).
Linux comes with approximately a zillion different keyboard layouts so you should be able to find what you need there. If you're stuck with Windows, sorry...
Yeah... but that's not much use when the keys themselves have been engraved with a different layout.
Nowadays, I always find myself forced to go to some vendors regional webpage which is not accessible in a language I understand due to the underlying (and horribly outdated) assumption that everyone is born, lives and dies in one tiny geographic area, from which they never move, and that they only are able to speak the "official" language used in that area.
So true, and so annoying.
Where I live, vendors sell computers with AZERTY or QWERTZ keyboards... but I want QWERTY since its a hell of a lot easier to program using a US layout... and don't even get me started about only being able to pick up an OS that is localized into a language NOT of my choice (even though there is no practical reason why the OS can't be supplied with all localized languages. (Note that OS X does come with all localizations as standard, unlike XP, et al)
The problem as I see is it that vendors and retailers still think of the world as individual countries with their own languages and, more importantly price structures... which is a polite way of saying they can and do get away with selling the same stuff in different countries with different prices (using localization as the excuse for different prices)... look at the whole region encoding on DVDs, which attempts to stop you buying DVDs from elsewhere which may be cheaper/better than whats on offer in your own region.
Just had a lunch in Zurich at Movenpick today. The VAT was explicitly printed on the bill, so it was clear how much of the price the tax was.
That's how things work in Europe... sales invoices/bill have to show how much VAT has been charged.
However when I ordered the salad and coffee the prices on the menu were final
Again, that's how things work in Europe. Prices show are always inclusive of VAT, because you, the customer, will be charged VAT (and as you are a consumer you can't claim back this tax because its a consumer-oriented tax). Its only when dealing with b2b that prices shown are net of VAT, because business don't pay VAT (or rather, they claim it back when buying from within their own country or don't have to pay it when buying from another EU country).
I'm surprised visa/MC actually shut them down. 3% of 100k/week is a decent chunk of change.
Most of that 3% goes to the acquiring bank, rather than the payment system (Visa/MC).
Unless you have a public key for the recipient, you can only send signed mail... when they reply to your signed mail they can then encrypt their response and give you their public key (and from then on you can send encrypted mail to them).
I think we're living in a nanny state where there is far to much of somebody else telling people what they should or should not listen to or watch. Now what would be more useful would be an option to have the bleeping/muting/whatever done by your set top box rather than in the broadcast audio... that way, you can simply have an option to hear the original audio, or have the censored version for those with delicate ears. FWIW, I hate it when broadcasters censor words out... watching something as innocent as 2 and-a-half-men is a right pain when even things like "ass" as muted... that god they don't try it with South Park.
I was raised on HH, which seems to overshadow anything else that Douglas did, but I have a special fondness for Dirk Gently, and just wish there could have been more of it... sure, it was different from HH, but there was a certain Douglassness about it.
I travel a lot within the EU and my phone gets bombarded with SMSs as I switch between different carriers outside my home country informing me how much it costs to send (national calls) or receive calls (inbound roaming).
Its not also the bosses that are at fault, just look at any of the recruitment agencies and you get the same lack of knowledge and the quest to get somebody who can tick all the requirement boxes (especially if the requirements are *impossible* to get, like the infamous 5 or 10 years experience with X where X has only been out 1 or 2 years).
As an alpha geek, I've also moved over to a Mac. I've spent most of my professional life using and programming Windows. I've got Linux (Gentoo) based servers, and a Linux (Gentoo) workstation for development. However, I love the Mac. It offers the best of both worlds: a slick GUI, and a unix-system under the hood. Interestingly, when I first turned up at work with my Mac Book, I took a lot of flack from the Windows people... but after a few months more and more of them were considering moving to the Mac, primarily because "It Just Works". I've recently changed jobs and in the new place I've been amazed how many of the programmers there have Macs at home.
There is still a bit of imperial stuff in Europe... I recently installed a water osmosis system (from a French company) and had oodles of fun plumbing it into my water system... one of the connectors wasn't metric but imperial, so I had to rush down to the local hardware store and get an adaptor (which was a wonderful bit of turned brass with an metric thread on one side and an imperial thread on the other). IIRC all the valves (that's taps or faucets to the uninitiated) came only with imperial threads... not a metric one in sight.
Visual SourceSafe went through a few more (minor) release cycles... and while Microoft will quite happily sell you Visual SourceSafe 6.0, internally it was dropped and they've been using something else internally for years (and again that was an external system... the name of which I forget).