Welcome to Bergen

Bergen is known for the Hanseatic wharf, the fish market and the surrounding fjords and mountains. Especially the Hardangerfjord is easily accessible.

The City of Bergen and the Fjords of Norway offer you the ideal combination of nature, culture and pulsating city life.

Situated where sea and mountains meet, Bergen is a city with a big heart and endless enthusiasm and visitors are greeted with open arms. Welcome to Bergen, the old city with the young heart.

A European Cultural City
Bergen is more than 900 years old, a World Heritage City and was the European City of Culture in year 2000.

Enjoy fresh seafood at the Fish Market or stroll along the quayside and soak up the atmosphere of Bryggen, the old Hanseatic merchants’ quarter. Take the funicular to the top of Mount Fløyen or the cable car up to Ulriken, where the view of the city framed by the sea, fjords and mountains, is one of the most spectacular in Norway.

Bergen hosts a number of international music and cultural events throughout the year. The city is home to one of the world’s oldest symphony orchestras, and boasts a number of theatres and dance companies. Visit Edvard Grieg’s home, Troldhaugen, to hear his music where it was composed. Museums, art collections, churches and fascinating architecture all add to Bergen's unique atmosphere.

Bergen's title of City of Culture for 2000 is evident throughout the city. Renowned for its vibrant and contemporary design and music scene, Bergen has helped cultivate acts such as Ralph Myerz & the Jack Herrend Band, Kings of Convenience, Røyksopp and Sondre Lerche, to name but a few.

Why War?

War is any large scale, violent conflict. War grows from the almost universal tribal warfare that has occurred throughout history, to wars between city states, nations, or empires. By extension, the word is now used for any struggle, as in the war on drugs or the war on terror. It was once thought man was the only creature who fought wars, but closer observation of animal life has discovered wars between ant colonies and chimpanzee tribes. A group of combatants and their support is called an army on land, a navy at sea, and air force in the air. Wars may be prosecuted simultaneously in one or more different theatres. Within each theater, there may be one or more consecutive military campaigns. A military campaign includes not only fighting but also intelligence, troop movements, supplies, propaganda, and other components. Continuous conflict is traditionally called a battle, although this terminology is not always applied to conflicts involving aircraft, missiles or bombs alone, in the absence of ground troops or naval forces. A civil war is the use of force to resolve internal differences.

In War Before Civilization, Lawrence H. Keeley, a professor at the University of Illinois, calculates that approximately 90-95% of known societies engaged in at least occasional warfare, and many fought constantly. A war may begin following an official declaration of war but undeclared wars are common. Any general theory of war must explain not only war but also peace. It must explain not only the wars fought in almost every generation in almost every country in the world, but also the rare instances of extended relative peace, including the Pax Romana and the peace in Europe since World War II.

Motivations for war may be different for those ordering the war than for those undertaking the war. For a state to prosecute a war it must have the support of its leadership, its military forces, and the population. For example, in the Third Punic War,[5] Rome's leaders may have wished to make war with Carthage for the purpose of eliminating a resurgent rival, while the individual soldiers may have been motivated by a wish to end the practice of child sacrifice. Since many people are involved, a war may acquire a life of its own -- from the confluences of many different motivations.

In Why Nations Go to War, by Darian Domer, the author points out that both sides will claim that morality justifies their fight. He also states that the rationale for beginning a war depends on an overly optimistic assessment of the outcome of hostilities (casualties and costs), and on mis-perceptions of the enemy's intentions

Education

Education encompasses teaching and learning specific skills, and also something less tangible but more profound: the imparting of knowledge, positive judgment and well-developed wisdom. Education has as one of its fundamental aspects the imparting of culture from generation to generation (see socialization). Education means 'to draw out', facilitating realization of self-potential and latent talents of an individual. It is an application of pedagogy, a body of theoretical and applied research relating to teaching and learning and draws on many disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, sociology —often more profound than they realize—though family teaching may function very informally. Education systems are established to provide education and training, in most cases for children and the young. A curriculum defines what students should know, understand and be able to do as the result of education. A teaching profession delivers teaching which enables learning, and a system of polices, regulations, examinations, structures and funding enables teachers to teach to the best of their abilities. Sometimes education systems can be used to promote doctrines or ideals as well as knowledge, which is known as social engineering. This can lead to political abuse of the system, particularly in totalitarian states and government. Primary (or elementary) education consists of the first years of formal, structured education. In general, primary education consists of six or seven years of schooling starting at the age of 5 or 6, although this varies between and sometimes within countries. Globally, around 70% of primary-age children are enrolled in primary education, and this proportion is rising.[1]. Under the Education for All program driven by UNESCO, most countries have committed to achieving universal enrollment in primary education by 2015, and in many countries it is compulsory for children to receive primary education. The division between primary and secondary education is somewhat arbitrary, but it generally occurs at about eleven or twelve years of age. Some education systems have separate middle schools with the transition to the final stage of secondary education taking place at around the age of fourteen. Mostly schools which provide primary education are referred to as primary schools. Primary schools in these countries are often subdivided into infant schools and junior schools. In most contemporary educational systems of the world, secondary education consists of the second years of formal education that occur during adolescence.

It is characterised by transition from the typically compulsory, comprehensive primary education for minors to the optional, selective tertiary, "post-secondary", or "higher" education (e.g., university, vocational school) for adults.[citation needed] Depending on the system, schools for this period or a part of it may be called secondary or high schools, gymnasiums, lyceums, middle schools, colleges, or vocational schools. The exact meaning of any of these varies between the systems.

The exact boundary between primary and secondary education varies from country to country and even within them, but is generally around the seventh to the tenth year of schooling. Secondary education occurs mainly during the teenage years. In the United States and Canada primary and secondary education together are sometimes referred to as K-12 education, and in New Zealand Year 1-13 is used. The purpose of secondary education can be to give common knowledge, to prepare for higher education or to train directly in a profession.

Product review: Adobe breathes fresh AIR into RIA

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) packages a host of Web technologies and enables RIAs (rich Internet applications) to run outside of the browser on the user's local desktop. Those underlying technologies can be Adobe's own Flex, Flash, and ActionScript, for example, or just plain old HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX libraries. The results can be spectacular. AIR applications can take on either a custom or native appearance. In particular, data-driven dashboards really sing when freed from browser constraints, as Nasdaq’s Market Replay application demonstrates.

[ See why Tom Yager is a big fan of AIR. And how InfoWorld used AIR technology in its Windows Sentinel service. See our special report on rich Web development tools including reviews of Microsoft Silverlight, Curl, WaveMaker Visual AJAX Studio, JackBe Presto, Nexaweb Enterprise, Backbase, Bindows, Tibco General Interface, and more open source AJAX toolkits than you can shake a div at. ]

The resulting application gains access to OS features such as dragging and dropping to and from the local file system, clipboard access for cutting and pasting between AIR and other applications, network connectivity, encrypted local storage, and perhaps most noteworthy, offline functionality. Thanks to AIR's persistent, local SQLite data store, AIR apps continue to function without a network connection.

Further, AIR doesn't require Web developers to learn anything new. They can easily create AIR apps using the tools and techniques they already know. And because AIR is cross-OS compatible, the same application code can be deployed to Windows, Mac, and eventually Linux systems. An alpha version of AIR for Linux is available at Adobe Labs.

Pieces of AIR
Adobe AIR comprises several components. The SDK is a command line toolkit for packaging and deploying Web applications as AIR apps. It includes a schema template for generating the AIR manifests (which define various properties of each application including name, security certificate, and files included within the package), APIs for the framework, a service monitor, and a command line debugger that lets you do some testing without first needing to package up your app. The entire lot is available for free, and several components are open sourced under the Mozilla Public License.

AIR incorporates dual engines – the Flash/ActionScript JIT and WebKit – to support applications built in either Flex/Flash/MXML or HTML/JavaScript. AJAX developers can run AIR without ever needing to learn ActionScript.

The underlying application components are packed into an AIR installer file, which is little more than a zip file containing program assets, the XML manifest, and a digital certificate to verify authenticity.

The command line tools are easy enough to work with, and you can use any text editor to create an AIR app. Adobe provides plug-ins for creating AIR applications in Flash CS3 and Dreamweaver CS3, as well as third-party tools such as Aptana Studio. However, I recommend you try Adobe's new commercial development tool, the Flex Builder 3.0 IDE. Based on Eclipse, Flex Builder provides easy graphical tools for laying out GUIs, binding to servers and data sources, and generating the underlying MXML code.

AIR apps can take advantage of protocols including FTP, AMF (ActionScript Messaging Format), JSON, SOAP, and RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol for streaming media), and they can communicate with Adobe LiveCycle and BlazeDS servers using server-side RPC and messaging calls.

James R. Borck is senior contributing editor of the InfoWorld Test Center.

Paypal

PayPal is an e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. It serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods such as checks and money orders. PayPal performs payment processing for online vendors, auction sites, and other corporate users, for which it charges a fee. It sometimes also charges a transaction fee for receiving money (a percentage of the amount sent plus an additional fixed amount). The fees charged depend on the currency used, the payment option used, the country of the sender, the country of the recipient, the amount sent and the recipient's account type^[1]. On October 3, 2002, PayPal became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay.^[2] Its corporate headquarters are in San Jose, California, United States at eBay's North First Street satellite office campus. The company also has significant operations in Omaha, Nebraska, Scottsdale, Arizona and Austin, Texas in the U.S.; India, Dublin, Ireland; and Berlin, Germany.^[3]

Microsoft unveils its web vision

Microsoft has lifted the lid on a new web service called Live Mesh, designed to connect a multiplicity of devices and applications online.

The service is seen by many as a key plank in the company's vision for the future of the web.

Live Mesh is designed to blur the lines between running software and storing data on a desktop and "in the cloud".

Microsoft's Amit Mital said Live Mesh would "connect and bring devices together... to work in concert".

Live Mesh pits Microsoft against companies like Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com which are already offering different varieties of so-called software-as-a-service systems.

It comes as Microsoft is engaged in a bid to buy rival Yahoo and emphasises just how important the web has become to the firm.

From dot.life blog Microsoft has been torn between a business model which ties people to specific platforms, and a realisation that the web is turning everything on its head Darren Waters, Technology editor, BBC News website Read more on the dot.life blog

"We may be seeing signs of a Microsoft that is newly focused," Jonathan Yarmis, a vice president and analyst at AMR Research, told Reuters news agency.

He added: "This is exciting because it has as much to do with who is doing it as what Microsoft is doing."

Microsoft has long been criticised for its unfocused efforts in the online space and for attempting to tie the use of Windows to the web.

While initially offered for Windows XP and Vista users, Microsoft has said Live Mesh will also be rolled out to Apple Macs and other platforms.

Mr Mital, general manager of Live Mesh, said: "Devices are how we interact in this new "web-connected" world and we use a variety of them, including PCs, laptops, media devices, phones, digital picture frames, game consoles, music players and the list grows at every CES.

Live Mesh is a web-based platform

"However, as we discover, adopt and use more of these digital devices, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep the people, information and applications we depend on in sync."

Microsoft says Live Mesh can be used to create an online network of devices, from your PC to your mobile phone.

Files and folders, such as documents, music and photos, on those devices can be synchronised online and accessed via a web browser.

Live Mesh is also designed to facilitate the sharing of media online between different users.

"This new software-plus-services platform enables PCs and other devices to 'come alive' by making them aware of each other through the internet," said Mr Mital.

"We aspire to bring together Windows, Windows Live, and Windows Mobile by creating seamless experiences that span these offerings," Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, wrote in a memo to staff this week.

Users will have 5GB of personal online storage and unlimited peer-to-peer data, for synchronising information between devices.