Everyone's so incredibly focused on their quarterly/monthly/dayly/hourly earnings numbers that companies don't want to sink big bucks into big IT project right now. Give them a chance to rent something by the hour/MIP/whatever and even if they pay more over the long run it keeps the 'up front' expenditure down and doesn't hit this quarter's numbers...makes the numbers look better, keeps the investors happy, lets the execs sleep a little better at night. Plus if you rent MIPS for a month on some new super-duper project and realize it's a dud you can walk away without having invested too heavily.
I believe the comment you are replying to is talking about the anti-GPL letter, not the purchase of iBooks by Maine using money from the Gates foundation. As such, your comment has absolutely no relevance to the parent. Nice work moderators!:)
In factual reality, the Sun is owned by Quebecor (sp ?), a large printing company which apparently aspired to being a media monolith.
However, having the Star secretly buy the Sun and operate it as a badly written tabloid much as it is today, would have been a masterstroke of strategy. What's a better way to look good than to be much better than your competition ? Owning both would keep the bar low.
Having said that, they didn't need to spend the money. The Sun seems perfectly happy to put out a crappy paper and make the Star look good free of charge!
This sounds good, but it doesn't work that well especially in a relatively small market like Canada. We have two large national newspapers and I don't think there's enough market to support more. If one of them became overly biased (which I felt the National Post was before Izzy ever bought it, but that's my opinion) I could happily support the other.
However in a very short period of time both of these newspapers were bought up by corporate media monoliths. Izzy owns the Post, a whack of local papers and Global, one of our national TV networks. The Globe&Mail was bought up by Bell, who also bought up CTV (national TV & cable news networks).
Frankly, I'm happy to be in Toronto where at least we have the Toronto Star, a good local paper not owned by Izzy and not part of the Sun chain (which is crap). If it weren't for the Star & CBC I'd be down to reading BBC over the 'net for all my news.
The end result is a society full of people who scoff at law, and refuse to participate in a corrupt system of government.
....and what was the voter turnout in the last US election ? You claim tht is a result of 'statist' economic policies, but really, is there any G8 country where the above statement is more applicable than the US ?
I want FutureShop to get off its ass way more than I want Rogers to roll it into their Digital set-top box.
I tried Rogers' free digital preview and it was *lame* (IMHO) - the current channels aren't really broadcast in digital, so they don't look or sound any different. The new channels were so incredibly underwhelming that getting them for free didn't seem like a bargain. If they paid me I still might not watch them.
There's plenty of TV on the first 50 channels that I don't see because I'm never home at normal hours. I want a PVR that doesn't come with another monthly fee from my local cable monopoly.
Wow, this is a greally great troll, but the part I loved the best was :
My ex is a nurse and she told me that there is at least 3 mugging related stabbings a week in toronto.
So we have second hand anecdotal evidence that Toronto, a city of over 2.5 million people, has 3 muggings per week. 3! So, that' 150 per year, over 2.5 million comes out to.06 muggings per 1000 people per year (common statistical comparison). Yeah, we suck.
Re:it's wired! So it requires a common HW interfac
on
USB On-the-Go Go Go Go
·
· Score: 2
The biggest problem with Bluetooth has never been whether 'a' project works, it's been whether umpteenth vendors can all write their own software stacks of a very complicated (and, back then, very "1.0") communications protocol and then all show up at Comdex expecting their widgets to talk to each other. I saw that problem coming from miles back - the Bluetooth 1.0 intervendor 'interop' was nothing short of a disaster and it shouldn't have surprised anyone. Now it's almost 2003, shipping Bluetooth implementations are out there...but they're relatively rare and the average person on the street has never heard of it, doesn't know what it is and exerts absolutely zero market pressure for it. They created an incredibly complicated solution for a simple problem (cable replacement) which, it turns out, few people want. It reminds me sooooo much of IrDA...which I also worked with. (My career in device drivers was a little checkered, to put it nicely.)
As for Intel 'paying' to not have Firewire on the motherboards.....who were they paying ? At the time of USB1 vs 1394 the majority of motherboards were using Intel chipsets. You can accuse them of being biased against firewire, but it didn't take any payola - it was their market to steer. We have more competition now, but most of the other motherboard chipset vendors are trying to undercut Intel on price, they're not going to worry about Firewire.
Re:it's wired! So it requires a common HW interfac
on
USB On-the-Go Go Go Go
·
· Score: 2
I would think that this bit of PR is more of another way to stall Bluetooth
No one has to do anything to 'stall' Bluetooth - they've done that all on their own.
(Speaking as someone who was working on a Bluetooth project 4 years ago and still hasn't seen anything decent come to market)
It is a fact that dragging and dropping with a mouse is currently the most powerful way to automate complex tasks on a computer
I have to say this is a bit of a stretch...I was with you right up until you used the word 'complex'. The mouse is the best way to automate simple tasks. I don't like using a keyboard to navigate a GUI or surf the web, but when I sit down to type this response I find the keyboard much more powerful than using a mouse to drag and drop characters or words. The more 'complex' a task is (IMHO) the more possible actions there are at any time, the harder it is to automate that task with a mouse.
Are there any Palm users out there that prefer Graffiti to QWERTY ? (That's not rhetorical - I'd like to know). When I want to select something from 10 options a mouse is just jim-dandy, if I want to select something from tens of thousands of options (an adult vocabulary) I just can't see doing it with a mouse.
Well, I have a 3Mp camera and I shoot at 3 Mp all the time....because I spent the extra money for 128 MB flash cards so I can take lots of good pictures without having to worry about it.
Having said that, when I go to download pics over USB I get a little agitated over the 2-3 seconds per pictures since it takes a few minutes to download the entire card's worth. If I had to wait 47 seconds *per picture* something would be bouncing off the wall. (Or I could cut down on the caffeine:) )
Speaking as someone who worked on Bluetooth for a while at least 3 years ago this strikes me as typical of most Bluetooth demos/concepts I've seen - sounds really cool, not incredibly practical in real usage and not anything I'd spend extra to get....but that's just my opinion.
I have a friend (of Italian descent mind you) who claims their system is the best possible soluction. Every government ends up being a minority government, so the government cannot become too powerful. Doesn't that sound like the 'smaller government' that the convervatives keep nattering on about ?
Of course the average Italian government is far more socialist than Republican, but that's another matter.:)
IBM has a chip packaging plant in Bromont, Quebec. As part of their disaster recovery planning they had an agreement to lease a locomotive in case of a prolonged power outage - especially in the winter when cold temperatures could damage the equipment. So the ice storm hits, knocks out power and phone lines all over the place, their locomotive shows up and they connect it to run power into the chip plant - not to try to run the plant mind you, just to keep it heated....except once they got that accomplished they realized they had enough excess energy to run the grid for most of the town. (!)
You want good will from local government/townspeople ? Try heating their houses for a couple of weeks in the middle of winter.:)
Sure, let them run their business anyway they want to.....the second they start paying a fair price for their bandwidth!
Your cell-phone companies have been paying through the nose to get the frequency licenses to provide next-generation services, while the radio stations have huge chunks of bandwidth that they seem to have been granted lifetime free licenses for. The justification for this used to be that they 'provide a public service'....payola is not a public service.
Interesting - Sony & Nintendo designed their units from scratch so as they ramp up their production volume of custom chips they get sizable decreases in cost.
Microsoft went with mostly standard parts which already had sizeable production volumes, so there wasn't nearly as much room for their cost to drop down. Even worse, their CPU speed is now lower than anything sold in the PC market, so Intel is seing overall volumes of that chip drop, meaning costs can't get any lower. Likewise the small (by PC standards) hard-drive they use. RAM prices were dropping but have slowed lately. Throw in the custom video/audio/system chip that NVidia did for them - for which NVidia & MS are in court over chip pricing - and that's the bulk of the cost.
Maybe it's just me, but it looks like MS painted themselves into a corner. Because so many of their components were already "volume-discounted" from day one they have far less room to lower costs. Meanwhile Sony is supposed to combine the two main chips in the PS2 into a single chip to drive down costs even more - something I don't think MS could get NVidia & Intel to do - and I think MS has a lot more pain to come.
Seriously, if they distribute the source code but refuse to let the binaries out, how long do they expect it to be before someone else compiles the source and puts up a ULClone ISO ?
One of the problems with giving the professional society "teeth" is that a lot of the engineering grads working in the field don't belong to the professional society to start with. For me, I graduated with degrees in both EE & CS and went to work in a mixed hardware & software environment writing low-level code. My employer (a large international company) stated flat out that they didn't care if the engineers were members of the professional society and would not reimburse any of the costs of getting certified. For many of the jobs they would interchange engineers and CS grads as needed. So very few enginners in the group ever joined the professional society at all, and my impression is that this is typical of engineers working in software development.
Given, for engineers working in construction or civil engineering they are required to have professional certification, but some fields have never been like that. If you tried to legislate this into effect the software companies would cry bloody murder to the goverment about how this will restrict their ability to hire who they want, drive up costs, yadda yadda yadda. In short, never gonna happen....and if it's not legislated, it's meaningless. The ACM & IEEE could make all the proclamations they wanted and it won't stop companies writing spyware, spamware or whatever.
You're missing the point. OK, we don't have many buildings falling down but then again no one is paying engineers to build faulty buildings. If you want to talk about ethics and holding paramount public safety and welfare ask yourself how many engineers work for the major tobacco companies, major gun companies, how many engineers were busy helping design new nuclear weapons when we already had enough to pave the planet, etc. There are engineers out there doing plenty of stuff that you or I would likely consider ethically dubious, but they're doing what they're told to do by the folks writing the cheques...and then they go home to their families and pay the rent.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against engineering...I am one after all. (EE class of '93) But the guidelines of the professional society do not make us any more or less ethical than the next profession. In the end we do what we're told or we get replaced.
As a side note, one of my favorite classes in university was "Ethics in Engineering". The class had a large section on 'whistleblowing' with examples such as the shuttle explosion, etc. The sad part was that in every major case of whistleblowing we studied the engineer who blew the whistle never worked in their former field again. The theme of the section seemed to be "blowing the whistle is the right thing to do in these types of situations....but it will cost you your career". It wasn't a very popular section.:)
BTW, is this the same Turner as runs TNT? I happened to be in the US for the 1990 World Cup, and remember that TNT repeatedly interrupted the live soccer to run adverts while play continued, and it was the same adverts over and over and over again. After that I vowed never to by "Tums" again. Worse, they ran trailers for their own World Cup coverage instead of cutting back to the game which was going on. Madness.
It's a cultural thing - all North American sports intentionally have breaks in play so the networks can play ads....so they don't know what to do with soccer. Lately they've gotten better - in Canada at least they'll go to a picture-in-picture display so you can at least watch the game while the ads play.
Really, can you imagine a half-hour of Milk & Cheese ? Not a half hour of 5-minute segments, but an actual half-hour show ? Not based on anything Dorkin has done so far. It's easy to be a snob (as you've just shown) but out of all of Dorkin's comics there's very little that would stand up as a weekly half-hour show. Even Hectic Planet devolved into a short (not full-issue) episodes towards the end. That just wouldn't work as a TV series. What happens if your write the funniest Simpsons episode ever....but it only comes out to 16 minutes ? You have to find some way to stretch it out by 6 extra minutes (35%) because the network's not looking for any 16-minute episodes.
I like Evan Dorkin (not a big Clowes fan)....and I've got 5$ that says he watches the Simpsons, at least the reruns. If you work at home and have the TV on the Simpsons reruns are the highlights of daytime TV....and Dorkin has to have some excuse as to why him comics come out once every blue moon.
The biggest reason for different source code for IE/Netscape is (IMHO) that IE's native Java support is frozen at V1.1.x. Most applets that I see on the web are coded for this level of Java and, generally speaking, run under Netscape....but since Netscape provides (I think) V1.3.x of Java you could definitely write a different version for V1.3 that has more features/whatever than the V1.1.x that you have to maintain for IE. Of course Sun released a Java plug in for IE to give it more up-to-date Java support....but you can't assume your customers all have it.
Having said all that, I think applets are the worst representative of Java usage. I write server-side Java and really like it. The server-side specs (JSP's, Servlets, J2EE) seem to be port across platforms quite well. When we deploy code on WebSphere (IBM's J2EE platform) it runs across Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris,etc with no problems. I haven't tried porting EJB's between J2EE platforms but I have written Servlets & JSP's on one platform and moved them to another with no changes, although the deployment details (what goes where) may differ.
>Forget about that $100k US (equivalent) coding position in Ottawa
So what would be the equivalent when you adjust by cost of living and purchasing-power parity? $100k CA? $90k CA?
Probably in that neighborhood. I've had plenty of tech friends move south and most of them say you need to get your salary converted from C$ to US$ straight up or better to cover the cost of living. Then again, most of these guys moved to California....my buddy who moved to Texas just laughs at all of us (no state income tax) but he grew up there so he's used to it.
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Everyone's so incredibly focused on their quarterly/monthly/dayly/hourly earnings numbers that companies don't want to sink big bucks into big IT project right now. Give them a chance to rent something by the hour/MIP/whatever and even if they pay more over the long run it keeps the 'up front' expenditure down and doesn't hit this quarter's numbers...makes the numbers look better, keeps the investors happy, lets the execs sleep a little better at night. Plus if you rent MIPS for a month on some new super-duper project and realize it's a dud you can walk away without having invested too heavily.
I believe the comment you are replying to is talking about the anti-GPL letter, not the purchase of iBooks by Maine using money from the Gates foundation. As such, your comment has absolutely no relevance to the parent. Nice work moderators! :)
In factual reality, the Sun is owned by Quebecor (sp ?), a large printing company which apparently aspired to being a media monolith.
However, having the Star secretly buy the Sun and operate it as a badly written tabloid much as it is today, would have been a masterstroke of strategy. What's a better way to look good than to be much better than your competition ? Owning both would keep the bar low.
Having said that, they didn't need to spend the money. The Sun seems perfectly happy to put out a crappy paper and make the Star look good free of charge!
This sounds good, but it doesn't work that well especially in a relatively small market like Canada. We have two large national newspapers and I don't think there's enough market to support more. If one of them became overly biased (which I felt the National Post was before Izzy ever bought it, but that's my opinion) I could happily support the other.
However in a very short period of time both of these newspapers were bought up by corporate media monoliths. Izzy owns the Post, a whack of local papers and Global, one of our national TV networks. The Globe&Mail was bought up by Bell, who also bought up CTV (national TV & cable news networks).
Frankly, I'm happy to be in Toronto where at least we have the Toronto Star, a good local paper not owned by Izzy and not part of the Sun chain (which is crap). If it weren't for the Star & CBC I'd be down to reading BBC over the 'net for all my news.
The end result is a society full of people who scoff at law, and refuse to participate in a corrupt system of government.
....and what was the voter turnout in the last US election ? You claim tht is a result of 'statist' economic policies, but really, is there any G8 country where the above statement is more applicable than the US ?
I want FutureShop to get off its ass way more than I want Rogers to roll it into their Digital set-top box.
I tried Rogers' free digital preview and it was *lame* (IMHO) - the current channels aren't really broadcast in digital, so they don't look or sound any different. The new channels were so incredibly underwhelming that getting them for free didn't seem like a bargain. If they paid me I still might not watch them.
There's plenty of TV on the first 50 channels that I don't see because I'm never home at normal hours. I want a PVR that doesn't come with another monthly fee from my local cable monopoly.
Wow, this is a greally great troll, but the part I loved the best was :
.06 muggings per 1000 people per year (common statistical comparison). Yeah, we suck.
My ex is a nurse and she told me that there is at least 3 mugging related stabbings a week in toronto.
So we have second hand anecdotal evidence that Toronto, a city of over 2.5 million people, has 3 muggings per week. 3! So, that' 150 per year, over 2.5 million comes out to
The biggest problem with Bluetooth has never been whether 'a' project works, it's been whether umpteenth vendors can all write their own software stacks of a very complicated (and, back then, very "1.0") communications protocol and then all show up at Comdex expecting their widgets to talk to each other. I saw that problem coming from miles back - the Bluetooth 1.0 intervendor 'interop' was nothing short of a disaster and it shouldn't have surprised anyone. Now it's almost 2003, shipping Bluetooth implementations are out there...but they're relatively rare and the average person on the street has never heard of it, doesn't know what it is and exerts absolutely zero market pressure for it. They created an incredibly complicated solution for a simple problem (cable replacement) which, it turns out, few people want. It reminds me sooooo much of IrDA...which I also worked with. (My career in device drivers was a little checkered, to put it nicely.)
As for Intel 'paying' to not have Firewire on the motherboards.....who were they paying ? At the time of USB1 vs 1394 the majority of motherboards were using Intel chipsets. You can accuse them of being biased against firewire, but it didn't take any payola - it was their market to steer. We have more competition now, but most of the other motherboard chipset vendors are trying to undercut Intel on price, they're not going to worry about Firewire.
I would think that this bit of PR is more of another way to stall Bluetooth
No one has to do anything to 'stall' Bluetooth - they've done that all on their own.
(Speaking as someone who was working on a Bluetooth project 4 years ago and still hasn't seen anything decent come to market)
But at least I'm not bitter.....:)
It is a fact that dragging and dropping with a mouse is currently the most powerful way to automate complex tasks on a computer
I have to say this is a bit of a stretch...I was with you right up until you used the word 'complex'. The mouse is the best way to automate simple tasks. I don't like using a keyboard to navigate a GUI or surf the web, but when I sit down to type this response I find the keyboard much more powerful than using a mouse to drag and drop characters or words. The more 'complex' a task is (IMHO) the more possible actions there are at any time, the harder it is to automate that task with a mouse.
Are there any Palm users out there that prefer Graffiti to QWERTY ? (That's not rhetorical - I'd like to know). When I want to select something from 10 options a mouse is just jim-dandy, if I want to select something from tens of thousands of options (an adult vocabulary) I just can't see doing it with a mouse.
It's a simple fact that the majority of cost for a CD goes into production and marketing.
If by 'marketing' you mean 'payola' then you're absolutely right.
Well, I have a 3Mp camera and I shoot at 3 Mp all the time....because I spent the extra money for 128 MB flash cards so I can take lots of good pictures without having to worry about it.
:) )
Having said that, when I go to download pics over USB I get a little agitated over the 2-3 seconds per pictures since it takes a few minutes to download the entire card's worth. If I had to wait 47 seconds *per picture* something would be bouncing off the wall. (Or I could cut down on the caffeine
Speaking as someone who worked on Bluetooth for a while at least 3 years ago this strikes me as typical of most Bluetooth demos/concepts I've seen - sounds really cool, not incredibly practical in real usage and not anything I'd spend extra to get....but that's just my opinion.
If you want an overview of the ice storm, here's a good link :
http://www.canoe.ca/CNEWSIceStorm/home.html
I have a friend (of Italian descent mind you) who claims their system is the best possible soluction. Every government ends up being a minority government, so the government cannot become too powerful. Doesn't that sound like the 'smaller government' that the convervatives keep nattering on about ?
:)
Of course the average Italian government is far more socialist than Republican, but that's another matter.
IBM has a chip packaging plant in Bromont, Quebec. As part of their disaster recovery planning they had an agreement to lease a locomotive in case of a prolonged power outage - especially in the winter when cold temperatures could damage the equipment. So the ice storm hits, knocks out power and phone lines all over the place, their locomotive shows up and they connect it to run power into the chip plant - not to try to run the plant mind you, just to keep it heated....except once they got that accomplished they realized they had enough excess energy to run the grid for most of the town. (!)
:)
You want good will from local government/townspeople ? Try heating their houses for a couple of weeks in the middle of winter.
Sure, let them run their business anyway they want to.....the second they start paying a fair price for their bandwidth!
Your cell-phone companies have been paying through the nose to get the frequency licenses to provide next-generation services, while the radio stations have huge chunks of bandwidth that they seem to have been granted lifetime free licenses for. The justification for this used to be that they 'provide a public service'....payola is not a public service.
Interesting - Sony & Nintendo designed their units from scratch so as they ramp up their production volume of custom chips they get sizable decreases in cost.
Microsoft went with mostly standard parts which already had sizeable production volumes, so there wasn't nearly as much room for their cost to drop down. Even worse, their CPU speed is now lower than anything sold in the PC market, so Intel is seing overall volumes of that chip drop, meaning costs can't get any lower. Likewise the small (by PC standards) hard-drive they use. RAM prices were dropping but have slowed lately. Throw in the custom video/audio/system chip that NVidia did for them - for which NVidia & MS are in court over chip pricing - and that's the bulk of the cost.
Maybe it's just me, but it looks like MS painted themselves into a corner. Because so many of their components were already "volume-discounted" from day one they have far less room to lower costs. Meanwhile Sony is supposed to combine the two main chips in the PS2 into a single chip to drive down costs even more - something I don't think MS could get NVidia & Intel to do - and I think MS has a lot more pain to come.
Seriously, if they distribute the source code but refuse to let the binaries out, how long do they expect it to be before someone else compiles the source and puts up a ULClone ISO ?
In a nutshell : Jon Katz bitterly dislikes AoTC, seems to have liked Spiderman.
Now why is this newsworthy for a second (or is it third) time ?
One of the problems with giving the professional society "teeth" is that a lot of the engineering grads working in the field don't belong to the professional society to start with. For me, I graduated with degrees in both EE & CS and went to work in a mixed hardware & software environment writing low-level code. My employer (a large international company) stated flat out that they didn't care if the engineers were members of the professional society and would not reimburse any of the costs of getting certified. For many of the jobs they would interchange engineers and CS grads as needed. So very few enginners in the group ever joined the professional society at all, and my impression is that this is typical of engineers working in software development.
Given, for engineers working in construction or civil engineering they are required to have professional certification, but some fields have never been like that. If you tried to legislate this into effect the software companies would cry bloody murder to the goverment about how this will restrict their ability to hire who they want, drive up costs, yadda yadda yadda. In short, never gonna happen....and if it's not legislated, it's meaningless. The ACM & IEEE could make all the proclamations they wanted and it won't stop companies writing spyware, spamware or whatever.
You're missing the point. OK, we don't have many buildings falling down but then again no one is paying engineers to build faulty buildings. If you want to talk about ethics and holding paramount public safety and welfare ask yourself how many engineers work for the major tobacco companies, major gun companies, how many engineers were busy helping design new nuclear weapons when we already had enough to pave the planet, etc. There are engineers out there doing plenty of stuff that you or I would likely consider ethically dubious, but they're doing what they're told to do by the folks writing the cheques...and then they go home to their families and pay the rent.
:)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against engineering...I am one after all. (EE class of '93) But the guidelines of the professional society do not make us any more or less ethical than the next profession. In the end we do what we're told or we get replaced.
As a side note, one of my favorite classes in university was "Ethics in Engineering". The class had a large section on 'whistleblowing' with examples such as the shuttle explosion, etc. The sad part was that in every major case of whistleblowing we studied the engineer who blew the whistle never worked in their former field again. The theme of the section seemed to be "blowing the whistle is the right thing to do in these types of situations....but it will cost you your career". It wasn't a very popular section.
BTW, is this the same Turner as runs TNT? I happened to be in the US for the 1990 World Cup, and remember that TNT repeatedly interrupted the live soccer to run adverts while play continued, and it was the same adverts over and over and over again. After that I vowed never to by "Tums" again. Worse, they ran trailers for their own World Cup coverage instead of cutting back to the game which was going on. Madness.
It's a cultural thing - all North American sports intentionally have breaks in play so the networks can play ads....so they don't know what to do with soccer. Lately they've gotten better - in Canada at least they'll go to a picture-in-picture display so you can at least watch the game while the ads play.
Really, can you imagine a half-hour of Milk & Cheese ? Not a half hour of 5-minute segments, but an actual half-hour show ? Not based on anything Dorkin has done so far. It's easy to be a snob (as you've just shown) but out of all of Dorkin's comics there's very little that would stand up as a weekly half-hour show. Even Hectic Planet devolved into a short (not full-issue) episodes towards the end. That just wouldn't work as a TV series. What happens if your write the funniest Simpsons episode ever....but it only comes out to 16 minutes ? You have to find some way to stretch it out by 6 extra minutes (35%) because the network's not looking for any 16-minute episodes.
I like Evan Dorkin (not a big Clowes fan)....and I've got 5$ that says he watches the Simpsons, at least the reruns. If you work at home and have the TV on the Simpsons reruns are the highlights of daytime TV....and Dorkin has to have some excuse as to why him comics come out once every blue moon.
The biggest reason for different source code for IE/Netscape is (IMHO) that IE's native Java support is frozen at V1.1.x. Most applets that I see on the web are coded for this level of Java and, generally speaking, run under Netscape....but since Netscape provides (I think) V1.3.x of Java you could definitely write a different version for V1.3 that has more features/whatever than the V1.1.x that you have to maintain for IE. Of course Sun released a Java plug in for IE to give it more up-to-date Java support....but you can't assume your customers all have it.
Having said all that, I think applets are the worst representative of Java usage. I write server-side Java and really like it. The server-side specs (JSP's, Servlets, J2EE) seem to be port across platforms quite well. When we deploy code on WebSphere (IBM's J2EE platform) it runs across Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris,etc with no problems. I haven't tried porting EJB's between J2EE platforms but I have written Servlets & JSP's on one platform and moved them to another with no changes, although the deployment details (what goes where) may differ.
>Forget about that $100k US (equivalent) coding position in Ottawa
So what would be the equivalent when you adjust by cost of living and purchasing-power parity? $100k CA? $90k CA?
Probably in that neighborhood. I've had plenty of tech friends move south and most of them say you need to get your salary converted from C$ to US$ straight up or better to cover the cost of living. Then again, most of these guys moved to California....my buddy who moved to Texas just laughs at all of us (no state income tax) but he grew up there so he's used to it.