Typically, you have to rescue a kings daughter or defeat a marauding ogre that has been terrorizing the townsfolk. That's how I got to be a level 9 Programmer, although the +2 keyboard, +3 against fire elementals, does help. If I take it to the next level, I get an enchanted chair.
Yep. I'm trying to hurry before I turn 40, when I lose 3 or 4 points. The big deal for Canada is that they have a rapidly aging population which apparently has little desire to reproduce, so they fill the need for new Canadians via immigration. Canada is apparently a desired spot for retirement because of the liberal social services, and without young people making taxable income, it becomes hard to support that kind of socialist utopia.
The food I miss most from Canada (I lived in Vancouver for 4 years) is pepperoni sticks. Why the hell can you not get pepperoni sticks in American supermarkets?!? Yeah, you can get these four-packs of greasy little twigs for $900, but that's not the same.
But generally I miss the overall Canadian culture, where the idea of politeness is not a joke, the concept of striving for the greater good is not met with scorn and an education is something to be sought out, not tolerated.
Immigration Canada is pretty slow, and they want a TON of paperwork. Seriously, a letter from every employer I've ever had? Are you kidding me? I'm looking at about another 3 years before I get in.
I don't know. There's never any actual problems for me, just a lot of nonsense questions. "Do you have any pirated software on this? Do you have any pirated movies?" Do people ever say "yes" to that?
I always make sure I'm squeaky-clean though. Don't bring over stuff that's illegal even if you've done it a million times before and everyone tells you it's fine. Don't antagonize the customs guy, even if he antagonizes you. Answer the actual question and not the question you think he wants answered. Don't volunteer information. Basic "Successfully Dealing With Authority 101" things.
> Everywhere I've travelled, the borders are subject to the same law as anywhere else. In the Schengen subset of the EU, borders are open to the extent that I've crossed them at 80mph.
Well, the EU probably has some kind of negotiated border rights, and as some kind of meta-nation, it's probably to be expected that it's exceptional in many ways. But big chunks of the Canada/US border used to be the same way, almost. Drive through, wave at the customs guy and keep moving.
> So customs authorities have the power to inspect the data on your laptop, or presumably any other data-carrying device, without warrant or even cause.
Pretty much. The important thing to remember about international borders is that you have essentially zero rights, and should therefore be really goddamn careful. It's weirder now at the Canadian/US border because it's always been so open, and now it's closing up a little. But it pays to remember that you're essentially in no-mans land and should act as such.
I'm not surprised so many IT departments are having trouble implementing it - the bleeding edge technology is probably conflicting with their DMAs and compromising their cookies.
It's actually the Canadian border guards who gave me a hard time with laptops. About every 2 or three times I go through, I've gotten lightly grilled (sounds delicious!) over the contents of it - they ask about pirated movies and software, never mentioned anything about porn, probably because they're Canadian and too polite.
So that makes the pointless annoyances at border crossing score something like US: 496 Canada: 2.
> What do you mean swing is aweful? Clearly you haven't used it in the past year.
If you're reaching down into Java2D to do complex rendering, which is what I'm doing, Swing performance was very poor. Now, maybe there's 1.5-specific techniques that will speed things up, but the code I wrote for 1.4.2 doesn't run significantly faster in 1.5.
> If you target java 1.4 or below you are pretty much guaranteed that all JVMs that came out in the last decade are compatible
Yeah, right. Every commercial java app I know of bundles it's own JRE for good reason. My last project would run in JDKs 1.3.[whatever the last version was], not run on any 1.4.0 JDK, about half of the 1.4.1 JDKs and any 1.4.2 due to some recurring weirdness in the XML parser.
> Yes you could. You still use java, you just instantiate activex objects, just like in VB or C#.
I'm only aware of 3rd party tools that facilitate this. Has something changed recently that lets you do it just using the JDK? That'd be kind of nice.
> As I said you could always use COM because you are targeting windows only.
I don't have to use COM with C# - not explicitly, anyway. I just have a nice Excel.Worksheet object. I'd rather not deal with the complexity of COM if I don't have to.
> I was curious as to why somebody would choose C# and VS over java and eclipse/netbeans/idea when java does everything C# does
And I've told you, at length. Delegates alone would have been enough to make me switch, especially when C# and Java are so close - it's easy to make the switch. The only thing is I keep capitalizing 'string' all the damn time.
> and the IDEs are so much better then VS.
Idea is better than VS, but not by a whole lot, especially if you get the Resharper plugin.
> YOu need them in C# and.NET not so much in java.
No, I need delegates in Java. I am so goddamn tired of writing these goddamn verbose interface declarations then writing an implementation of the interface. Delegates/function pointers are so much easier.
> Both SWT and Swing have excellent performance on windows.
That's hilarious. SWT is ok, Swing is awful. The license for Qt is insanely expensive, GTK looks like ass. Dunno about the rest.
> You will still need to deploy.NET 2.0
not if you only target 1.1
> You can use activex and COM.
Through Java? I suppose you could. But why would you when you have a nicer, cleaner, easier language in which to do it?
> If you wanted to use a pure java solution then there are excellent open source tools.
There are? Find me these excellent open source java tools with which I may read and write excel 2k3 files. I've looked - all the tools I could find were either read-only or could only write older formats.
I've been writing in Java since '97. I like it just fine. But it's not the solution for everything.
Delegates. Decent GUI performance. The ability to deploy apps without having my users jump through "do you have a supported JVM" hoops. And currently, the ability to read & write excel files without bringing in Third Party Tools Of Dubious Quality.
> That form of repression is just too expensive in an open society.
what repression? I'm talking about call monitoring. The NSA has titanic datasets describing the origin and destination of every call made in the US. Do they have recordings of those calls? I seriously doubt it. But the call graphs are there.
> It would be so expensive to 'monitor all calls' that the government would go broke overnight.
I'll agree that recording the audio seems infeasible. But the records of who called who are definitely there.
No one is free from repercussions of their speech. If I say that I think Windows XP is super-secure and Vista is going to be completely awesome, the likely repercussions are that a horde of people on slashdot will assume I'm an idiot.
'Repercussions' is not synonymous with 'jail time.' And speech free from the kind of repercussions you're talking about does not require anonymity.
Slashdot Mirror
Typically, you have to rescue a kings daughter or defeat a marauding ogre that has been terrorizing the townsfolk. That's how I got to be a level 9 Programmer, although the +2 keyboard, +3 against fire elementals, does help. If I take it to the next level, I get an enchanted chair.
I was hoping no one would notice that awful inadvertant pun.
THOSE BASTARDS!
> And yeah, I miss my culture every day. I am having a really hard time adapting down here.
Maybe these guys could help?
http://www.digitalmooselounge.com/
Yep. I'm trying to hurry before I turn 40, when I lose 3 or 4 points. The big deal for Canada is that they have a rapidly aging population which apparently has little desire to reproduce, so they fill the need for new Canadians via immigration. Canada is apparently a desired spot for retirement because of the liberal social services, and without young people making taxable income, it becomes hard to support that kind of socialist utopia.
The food I miss most from Canada (I lived in Vancouver for 4 years) is pepperoni sticks. Why the hell can you not get pepperoni sticks in American supermarkets?!? Yeah, you can get these four-packs of greasy little twigs for $900, but that's not the same.
But generally I miss the overall Canadian culture, where the idea of politeness is not a joke, the concept of striving for the greater good is not met with scorn and an education is something to be sought out, not tolerated.
> 1) Where would you live, if not in America
Canada.
> and 2) What's stopping you from going?
Immigration Canada is pretty slow, and they want a TON of paperwork. Seriously, a letter from every employer I've ever had? Are you kidding me? I'm looking at about another 3 years before I get in.
I don't know. There's never any actual problems for me, just a lot of nonsense questions. "Do you have any pirated software on this? Do you have any pirated movies?" Do people ever say "yes" to that?
I always make sure I'm squeaky-clean though. Don't bring over stuff that's illegal even if you've done it a million times before and everyone tells you it's fine. Don't antagonize the customs guy, even if he antagonizes you. Answer the actual question and not the question you think he wants answered. Don't volunteer information. Basic "Successfully Dealing With Authority 101" things.
> Everywhere I've travelled, the borders are subject to the same law as anywhere else. In the Schengen subset of the EU, borders are open to the extent that I've crossed them at 80mph.
Well, the EU probably has some kind of negotiated border rights, and as some kind of meta-nation, it's probably to be expected that it's exceptional in many ways. But big chunks of the Canada/US border used to be the same way, almost. Drive through, wave at the customs guy and keep moving.
It's not just American laws. Customs officials everywhere I'm aware of have the same lattitude.
> So customs authorities have the power to inspect the data on your laptop, or presumably any other data-carrying device, without warrant or even cause.
Pretty much. The important thing to remember about international borders is that you have essentially zero rights, and should therefore be really goddamn careful. It's weirder now at the Canadian/US border because it's always been so open, and now it's closing up a little. But it pays to remember that you're essentially in no-mans land and should act as such.
The revolutionary new networking technology from Valve that will give dialup players LAN speeds.
y )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPlay_(technolog
I'm not surprised so many IT departments are having trouble implementing it - the bleeding edge technology is probably conflicting with their DMAs and compromising their cookies.
It's actually the Canadian border guards who gave me a hard time with laptops. About every 2 or three times I go through, I've gotten lightly grilled (sounds delicious!) over the contents of it - they ask about pirated movies and software, never mentioned anything about porn, probably because they're Canadian and too polite.
So that makes the pointless annoyances at border crossing score something like US: 496 Canada: 2.
> What do you mean swing is aweful? Clearly you haven't used it in the past year.
If you're reaching down into Java2D to do complex rendering, which is what I'm doing, Swing performance was very poor. Now, maybe there's 1.5-specific techniques that will speed things up, but the code I wrote for 1.4.2 doesn't run significantly faster in 1.5.
> If you target java 1.4 or below you are pretty much guaranteed that all JVMs that came out in the last decade are compatible
Yeah, right. Every commercial java app I know of bundles it's own JRE for good reason. My last project would run in JDKs 1.3.[whatever the last version was], not run on any 1.4.0 JDK, about half of the 1.4.1 JDKs and any 1.4.2 due to some recurring weirdness in the XML parser.
> Yes you could. You still use java, you just instantiate activex objects, just like in VB or C#.
I'm only aware of 3rd party tools that facilitate this. Has something changed recently that lets you do it just using the JDK? That'd be kind of nice.
> As I said you could always use COM because you are targeting windows only.
I don't have to use COM with C# - not explicitly, anyway. I just have a nice Excel.Worksheet object. I'd rather not deal with the complexity of COM if I don't have to.
> I was curious as to why somebody would choose C# and VS over java and eclipse/netbeans/idea when java does everything C# does
And I've told you, at length. Delegates alone would have been enough to make me switch, especially when C# and Java are so close - it's easy to make the switch. The only thing is I keep capitalizing 'string' all the damn time.
> and the IDEs are so much better then VS.
Idea is better than VS, but not by a whole lot, especially if you get the Resharper plugin.
further updates as this shocking story progresses!
> YOu need them in C# and .NET not so much in java.
.NET 2.0
No, I need delegates in Java. I am so goddamn tired of writing these goddamn verbose interface declarations then writing an implementation of the interface. Delegates/function pointers are so much easier.
> Both SWT and Swing have excellent performance on windows.
That's hilarious. SWT is ok, Swing is awful. The license for Qt is insanely expensive, GTK looks like ass. Dunno about the rest.
> You will still need to deploy
not if you only target 1.1
> You can use activex and COM.
Through Java? I suppose you could. But why would you when you have a nicer, cleaner, easier language in which to do it?
> If you wanted to use a pure java solution then there are excellent open source tools.
There are? Find me these excellent open source java tools with which I may read and write excel 2k3 files. I've looked - all the tools I could find were either read-only or could only write older formats.
I've been writing in Java since '97. I like it just fine. But it's not the solution for everything.
Delegates. Decent GUI performance. The ability to deploy apps without having my users jump through "do you have a supported JVM" hoops. And currently, the ability to read & write excel files without bringing in Third Party Tools Of Dubious Quality.
> That form of repression is just too expensive in an open society.
what repression? I'm talking about call monitoring. The NSA has titanic datasets describing the origin and destination of every call made in the US. Do they have recordings of those calls? I seriously doubt it. But the call graphs are there.
> It would be so expensive to 'monitor all calls' that the government would go broke overnight.
I'll agree that recording the audio seems infeasible. But the records of who called who are definitely there.
No one is free from repercussions of their speech. If I say that I think Windows XP is super-secure and Vista is going to be completely awesome, the likely repercussions are that a horde of people on slashdot will assume I'm an idiot.
'Repercussions' is not synonymous with 'jail time.' And speech free from the kind of repercussions you're talking about does not require anonymity.
Naw. You can pay cash for a phone and register it with any throwaway email address. At least, that's how Boost works.
and you must live in denial.
> "All our phone calls and Internet traffic are monitored" is just. not. true,
uh, yeah, it is. calls are tracked and callgraphs are produced using software from this company: http://www.cogitoinc.com/
I didn't think this was even up for debate any more.
apparently someone forgot to never forget Oklahoma City, the anthrax mailings, and all the other acts of non-islamic terrism lately.
4/19, nevar forget.
Dear Lumpy,
Please don't be on my side.
Sincerely,
bunions
> buy a 'pay as you go' cell phone and register it with made up info
I would be willing to bet that the NSA can infer the owner by matching up previous call patterns.
But yeah, I'm not claiming equivalency, I'm just cautioning against pride and hubris.