Just curious, where in Europe do you live? Clearly, not the UK. The salaries there seem ridiculously low.
1 karma · joined April 14, 2025
The real problem facing Canada is a lack of coherent, fact-based innovation policy. We have an innovation tax credit that is proven to be the most inefficient in the developed world. Companies love it because they get free cash (the program is also known as the "free money" program). As someone who has worked in tech in Canada I have never, ever heard anyone say that the credits made research possible. This is work that was going to happen anyway.
I recently heard Perrin Beatty from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce speak. He argued that the government should no longer conduct long-term pure research but should switch to improving incremental innovations because that what companies need. Mr Beatty, a life long politician who inherited his wealth, made it clear that he doesn't have a clue about industrial R&D or the incentives underlying the different players. (Obviously, I've chosen a side in this debate...)
As a Canadian this upsets me because there is a long history of poor government investments, and putting political agendas ahead of economic ones. I have a feeling that in four or five years the current feel-good story will end with a lot of money spent but not a lot of actual money made. Or, more typically, Canadian mid-sized tech companies sold to foreign buyers.
In short, there are many things governments do very well here. Industrial policy does not seem to be one of them.
There is nothing wrong with having a monopoly per se as long as it was gained and maintained fairly.
However, it is a great library. No arguments there. It's a pain that its closed on Sundays just when kids want to use it most.
To be fair, academics can also be childish, vindictive, sexist. There is also a real problem of hiring one's friends and students. BUT inter-organizational competition helps to some extent with these problems. Regardless, they justify administration and associated costs.
Yes, actually re-reading OP and your comments made me realize that I actually agree with the parent post. Don't know what I was thinking at the time I originally read it.
When I purchased my SpiderOak account everything seemed to be going well. The service is twice as expensive as BackBlaze and CrashPlan but has better security. The software UI is also quite intuitive. The only problem was the support. A couple of weeks into my subscription my client died. I’d try to restart it and it would die again. I looked into the problem and then I emailed support at SpiderOak. Then I waited. Then I got an email from someone at SpiderOak saying that an ad campaign really paid off and they were signing up a lot of clients. They’d get back to me.
They never did.
I sent other emails. Sent my log files in. I was very, very polite. Over a week went by. Finally, I asked told them I’d really rather not work with them any more.
More time went by.
Finally, someone got back to me. They gave me instructions on how to cancel my account. They said they were sorry but they understood. Then they also told me how to fix my original problem. I would have stayed with SpiderOak if they had done something, anything more than that. I realize margins are tight but surely they could have thought a little bit about how to give me some confidence in their support. Instead, I was left with the distinct impression that their support staff is either chronically understaffed, under qualified or just doesn’t give a damn. Either way, it made me realize that this was not a company I could count on if something really went wrong.
I'm not trying to be adversarial, it's just that this answer doesn't provide anything but a "proof by anonymous internet authority" vague kind of answer.
Update: I can cut and paste the policy and TOS urls and they work in a different browser window. For some reason, when I am at the registration page for the beta and I click these links at the bottom it sends me to a login page.
Very few people want to get mired in the (inevitable) problems that arise in a paper for eternity. This is why there are review papers that summarize the state of the knowledge at a given point. These articles are useful summaries of what came before and what (at least appear to be) dead ends were found.
Maybe I'm missing some point with the author's article. But getting units of production out and finished (i.e. papers) is a useful process. I'm not sure what would be gained by keeping documents editable forever. Scientific literature is not code.
So, perhaps Skype and GV are suffering from over-extended networks? It must be hard to justify investing in better network infrastructure for a free product (or when your revenues are minimal). On that note, I don't get the impression that BlackBerry's network has much of a problem with network load these days...
To some extent all power bricks will have some problems like this. I just think that the apple power supplies are particularly poorly designed. I've had a Dell and a macbook pro. The bog standard power supply on the Dell lasted 5+ years of daily use. The apple connector -- which I cared for more than the Dell -- lasted just over a year.
Requiring everyone to water down their opinions in order not to offend anyone (usually code for people with mainstream views) is truly offensive. In civil society we can all hold opinions and are able to express them. This is why democracies work so well -- at least better than all the alternatives!
I'm a bit older than the average reader here, so perhaps I'm biased. It seems to me that many people raised in the toxic and simplistic battles between left and right in the US media don't seem to have much of an intuitive sense of civil debate. I think the lack of good examples may be one reason.
In short: People have different opinions. If you don't agree, feel free to speak, but be civil.