Being German, my perspective is a bit different.

First of all, I have no idea why one would want to express exports in number of goods, because a country exporting screws and fruit would be much better off than a country exporting huge container ships, which is ridiculous. I'd rather question the utility of using a virtual currency like the USD as a measurement, but as the Euro also is virtual (as opposed to having a gold standard or any other *real* value), I'll shrug it off.

Indeed the main difference between Germany and countries like China is exactly what you state, we export high-end, high-priced goods, among them lots of "brain goods" like patents, procedures, science. The cost of labor in Germany is so high that even considering to mass-produce something cheaply is out of the question.

I suppose you're American, given the way you use the word "socialist". ^^ Considering that the ideology of socialism was invented by one of my fellow Germans, I can assure you that we're far from having a socialist system in Germany. We have mandatory health care, for example, but the rates keep climbing while the services paid for decline, and we have a two-class system where the people who can afford "private" health care get everything while people having mandatory health care wait for months to even get an appointment at a specialist, no matter how sick they are (read: cancer, seizures, etc.).

Yes, we have mandatory unemployment insurance which also isn't cheap and only gives you roughly 60% of what you made - for 12 months in which you'll probably get your money cut even more if you refuse to take a considerably worse-paid job out of your profession at the other end of the country.

After those 12 months you get the equivalent of welfare which is at poverty level - once you've used up all your "resources". That means you won't get anything at all as long as you have a car, house, or the college savings of your children. Yes, you read that right. I'd have to sell my house (which is technically still owned by the bank), cancel all savings for old age and live from the savings of my children until I get the minimum living wage. Oh, and of course they can still cut it anytime they wish if they think you have "income", e.g. because you have parents living *above* the poverty line and "they will surely support their grandchildren, don't they? here, we cut EUR 50 per month for that income".

Socialist my ass. Sorry for the rant, but really, Germany isn't far from social riots, and the discussion about allowing the military to operate inside our borders shows that the politicians know it. (Our constitution, forced upon us by the "allies", doesn't allow the Bundeswehr to do police work, because the Nazi regime mixed police and military, and they're looking to change that so that "the Bundeswehr can help when the next floods come". Yeah, sure. I totally buy it.)

Actually we *do* have an influx of poor immigrants, yes, and I don't think this has an influence on our export, but maybe I'm missing a connection here.

The point is that we can only export so much as long as other countries can't keep up technologically. We're going to lose that position in the next 10 or 15 years, if not earlier, because the cost of the social systems explode, resulting in all of the above, taxes get higher, innovation gets stumped by the high cost of labor, and all the current government preaches is that it's because the market must become even freer. Yes, letting foreign investors buy up our local infrastructure and economy is totally going to work. Not.

But YOU guys are REALLY deep in the shit if even Spain has more exports per capita. Spain has a HUGE housing bubble that is going to burst soon, and is one of the shittiest economies in Europe. Italy the same (the latter, no housing bubble there), and they have a HUGE problem with organized crime. Look at the Fed interest rates. Look at how many dollars the Fed pumps out. The USD is going down the drain, and rightly so. There's nothing behind it. It's completely virtual, with an economy driven by consumers using lent money to consume. How many percent of American households are overindebted, 40%? 50%? I've read numbers as high as 60%, but I don't think that your economy would even *exist* at that rate unless you're really good at hiding turds.

Look, I don't want to insult you. I think the situation is really bad *everywhere* in the Western world. But all we do is talk about our greatness, while developing countries like China and India are eating our lunch. We will get fucked, and hard. And soon. The next investment bubble is already building up. When it bursts, the Fed can't decrease the interest rate any more. And nobody will want to have those worthless dollars any more. It will get ugly. Really ugly.

Solutions, anyone?

You're right, herding servers is very different from writing them - I'd say I'm on middle ground on both fronts, but my writing skills would be the weaker ones relatively. I've written some proprietary middleware servers for business processes, but those weren't exactly under high load. OTOH, they were rock-solid security-wise. (I know, we've thrown professional pen testing from different companies at them.)

That said, I find it sad that Diaspora will be going nowhere. The funding has shown that people have interest in a self-sustaining social network that deserves the name "network". Appleseed on the other hand is opaque to me, and that really means something. Oh well, so many ideas, so little time. End-to-end communication must be restored before ISPs take it from us, and not only for illegal downloading, but for something hypey like social networking. That way no ISP would dare kill said communication because the clients are depending on it.

Because, frankly, you all have your opinions set in stone already. It won't matter to you that the trashcan becomes an eject symbol once you grab a volume. It won't matter you can simply press Cmd-E to eject, just as it worked since System 7 at least, because casual users don't figure it out (and don't look through the menus either).

Different OSes are just that, different. I've been using Mac OS, OSX, Windows and Linux in various flavours in the last 15 years. Knowing OSX's evolution (and being around skillful people), I prefer OSX for my personal computing needs. I game on Windows. I keep using Linux because I want to keep up with where Gnome and KDE are going (nowhere and nuts, respectively). But if you saw me using my OSX rig only for a few minutes, you'd quickly abandon anything else. I was never an evangelist, and I even tell people to think twice before buying their first Mac, but just seeing me move around the machine has made two people abandon Windows for OSX.

The reason I'm no Mac evangelist is because I prefer to switch people to Linux - most people have usable machines and why should they have to buy hardware when all they need is someone to pop an Ubuntu CD into their old machine? For people needing new hardware, they tend to ask me about Macs anyway, and I let them make an informed decision, not press them into one thing or another. If someone's a gamer, I'll even tell him to keep Windows. I won't install or support that, though. I've stopped doing Windows support five years ago and have never missed it even for a second. I've had enough of that at work. ;)

OBTW, Barb, if you can install whatever you like on that Mac and have full Internet access, I suggest installing MacPorts for instant Linux software goodness. If you don't feel like using a BSD style ports system, VirtualBox also works quite well under OSX so you could use the iMac as a host system for your network and system monitoring needs or whatever you feel like. Installing a Debian VM just takes a few moments. (I know you're a programmer, but I have no idea about your server and VM fu or even interest.)

Everything fine here, I still get to choose the threshold by a non-scripted HTML select, FF 3.6.10 running on OSX 10.6.4. I have NoScript enabled, so maybe they sniff for JS and only give you the classic index when you don't have it.

As for the front page changes and the firehose - I never get to see those, I read the /. "front page" and my messages through RSS only because I couldn't stand the mess any more. The advantage is that I don't miss any story this way, even if I don't visit the site for some days.

Frankly I have never bothered to find out what all those new options mean (black, orange, yellow, WTF?) and the JS interface had so much lag on my dual-core machine that I'd just skip it.

Oh, I'm actually going to bookmark this, I'm thinking about integrating IMAP via dovecot on my FreeBSD server in the datacenter. Thanks for the hint, it sure doesn't look intuitive at first, and I was wondering about dovecot configuration for exactly that reason. exim has a nicely spread config, plus you can work with includes so you can test stuff in a VM and then just include everything once it works.

All of this is very good advice. Especially the part about yanking the cables out and actually *seeing* whether your setup works as expected. Due diligence is a concept not many people understand nowadays, and with the miserable pay and non-existant trust in some places, I can even understand it. I've been the COO of a 700 people corporation, and once IT understood that I know their job, value it, and do my best to improve their visibility and working conditions, they really did a great job. When I entered the corp., the CEO was thinking of canning them all and outsourcing everything. I talked shop with them, asked some questions that made clear I know what they're talking about, and that was already half the way to a real transformation.

Ah, the good times. It's a pity said corporation went under because somebody ran with an 8-figure sum.

Oh, yes, dovecot is pretty nice, I've been using (but not setting up or adminning) it for quite some time, it's rock solid. I have no idea how hard it is to set it up, though.

That's an easy one. I'm generally known to be 'that BSD guy who uses this green letters on black screen thing', so you already know my answers:

BSD. Hands down. With ssh, without fluff. If you can live with the panels, use them, but generally it's a better idea having the system configuration in a git repository on the testing server (you *do* have a local testing server, don't you?) and pushing it onto the live server when it's good.

Oh, and for mail I like exim, which I used quite some time before it became standard on FreeBSD, but that's because I know how to manipulate the queues and how to stuff in stuff between the other stuff. OTOH, I haven't been touching mail servers for about 18 months now so there might be some funky new stuff I don't know.

You guys obviously haven't been watching your documentaries. I remember well that episode from Captain Future in the 70's where they state that Saturn's rings are the result of the destruction of the Katein. This is why Captain Future travels back in time to have the people of the Katein build one of their moons into a spaceship to travel to their old holy planet.

Sheesh. Kids these days.

Um. For one, there's Exposé, then you can Cmd-Tab like on Windows, you can click onto the Dock icon of the desired application... add in Spaces and attaching apps to specific Spaces and you have everything you need. Especially the last option gives you the opporunity to switch to any application you like with one keystroke, Ctrl+[# of desired Space]. But hey, if you want to grind an axe, don't let me or facts get into your way. ;-)

I had to look up what a tramp stamp is, and in case you're interested in foreign language, the German equivalent is "Arschgeweih", literally "ass horns" (because they usually are tribals looking like horns).

I second Barb for the head shaving. Just do it. You have an interesting head, show it.

The first one sounds very good to me. I'm glad I could help! As I said, if you need a contact, let me know.

That said, the second one is as foul as could be. But I'd try to negotiate a high salary and pre-payment (salary paid at the beginning of the month), that could get you one or two months of basically free money. I don't know Canadian employment laws, but here in Germany you and your employer can end the contract without notice during the probation period (that usually lasts 6 months), so you're not bound to them. You might have to pay back the money for the days you haven't been "working". You know, scam as scam can. ;)=

What I forgot but you inquired about - it's rock-solid and really fast. I've had a shop go from 5000 to 500,000 products and 12 front-ends in one update and it still responded as fast as the small shop. This requires the appropriate servers, however, which is no problem as part of the Enterprise Edition is them helping you with setting up the infrastructure.

I've been doing a lot of e-commerce, and it's much, much harder than most people suspect. In fact, I think it's the royal discipline of online applications.

Usually e-commerce should be done as part of a PIM solution, where you have a well-managed product database containing all attributes, variations and media data (images, videos, sounds etc.). If you don't have that, sell it to the client. That's easy, because you can also automagically produce print brochures, catalogs, CRM, ERP *and* e-commerce from that PIM system. So it saves them a LOT of money and gives them a central authoritative data store, which alone is worth more than gold for most organizations (who struggle with product managers "storing" the product data in hand-built Excel or Access files). Multi-channel publishing included. ;)

Once you've got the PIM, you connect your ERP and your e-commerce solution to it, preferably as a live connection so that you can show and update stock information. I don't think any osCommerce or xtCommerce can do this, and frankly, if you're spending money on PIM, you shouldn't be Ebeneezer Scrooge and save on the web frontend to your business.

I can fully recommend the guys from OXID who are on their sure way to world domination because their product rocks like gibraltar. They've got a community edition which is OSS, and on top of that they've got two bigger editions which are well worth their money and come with PIM/ERP/CRM integration out of the box and support very advanced features like multi-frontends for different countries, brands or target demographics (all automagically maintained through the PIM/ERP with no extra work needed once they're set up!), plus all the usual stuff like reordering things before they get out of stock or special sales for items going out of program. (Again, automatically using a pretty simple rule language.)

And then there's the backend. You can have the os/xtCommerce style "manage and enter everything by hand" backend, but that doesn't apply to people using PIM. They offer a dashboard that connects all sorts of services to the shop, such as Google Checkout, eBay, local price search engines, basically automating the complete chain if you desire to do so. For example you can automatically have the system sell leftover stock on eBay and deal with the transactions from sale to checking that the money arrived and sending out the package. Plus, of course, connecting scoring databases to have clients credit rating checked depending on their place of living (yes, they connect services with maps containing metadata such as spending capacity if such data exists for your market), their history, order amount, money already earned with the client (basically "trust") or even order history by category (e.g. if people ordering sex toys usually have trouble paying, you only offer money up-front as a paying method for orders containing such categories).

Oh, and all backend connectors are *free* (yes, that's right). Of course if the services you use are commercial, you must still pay for those (eBay and credit rating comes to mind), but you just sign-up like you would if you didn't use OXID eSales. But, signing up via OXID gives discounts in some instances.

I could go on for hours, but you get the point. Plus, the product is well-written, has continuous unit and functional testing, a good partner and educational program (my programmers were all certified OXID engineers), and are very open to communication - you can actually talk to the CEO if you need to. I know, I've done it several times. ;-)

So, long story short, just head over to http://www.oxid-esales.com/ and download the community edition. It's free as in speech and beer. If you start building with it, it can be upgraded painlessly to one of the other editions.

If you need a direct contact, drop me an e-mail. I'm pretty sure I can get you a good price, too. You know, I'm the one from Germany who asked you about those death threats on FB via PM. ;) (I don't know if you can keep track with the different user names here, on * and the real names - I can't for sure. *g*)