PE is used by Microsoft native code, but also by.NET. Apple's support of Java has slowed down and they may be looking for a replacement.
Furthermore, C# and CLR would be a reasonable platform for them to move to, given that Microsoft is not dogmatic about what libraries to use with the CLR; they could probably even create an Objective C to CLR compiler, giving people the choice of either running Objective C as native code or as CLR bytecodes. It would also make it easier for Windows developers to develop for Macintosh.
How prominently such support would feature in OS X would have to be seen; it might only be used for things like Silverlight, or it might become a full alternative to native development.
I think that sort of thing is called "predatory pricing": pricing something below cost in order to drive a competitor out of business. It's frowned upon in a free market, in particular when a company uses one monopoly to support predatory pricing in a different market.
Of course, given that Apple itself dominates the MP3 player market so much, I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry...
Some of them even throw in WiFi. Those phones aren't even particularly expensive (about $15 for the Nokia with activation).
The US phone market is several years behind Europe technologically. In part, that's because it's so fragmented and because the US chose frequencies different from the standard ones used mostly everywhere else.
Oh, and you can get a 3.5G iPhone-like phone: the Samsung F700; it looks superb, and squeezes a full keyboard into something with roughly the same form factor and look as the iPhone:
Having abusive partners seems to be another expression of anger, an attempt to hide his anger from himself.
I don't think this is a psychological issue, I think it's a business issue. Apple has abused a number of their partners in the past, and probably the only companies willing to partner with Apple at this point are companies that are themselves used to playing hardball with their own partners. Any company who thinks of a partnership like this as a long term, mutually beneficial, cooperative relationship would probably not be talking to Apple.
Follow biotechnology much? And the boon to Computer Science / Engineering has been huge, just for a start.
Computer science/engineering in particular have made very little progress over the last decade; most of what is touted as progress now is research results from the 70's and 80's finally being implemented, combined with faster machines. That has had a lot of impact on daily life, but research has stagnated.
As for biology, there has been an explosion of new data, but little in terms of fundamentally new understanding.
Why on earth is the EU funding something like this? Do they really think they'll do a better job sorting this sort of thing out than private industry?
Yes. And US history shows that they are correct: most high tech companies and inventions start out as university research; the private sector merely commercializes it.
Without lots of government funding, there would be no hightech industry.
Those of you who haven't worked on the business side of an ISP may not realize this, but customers who actually use the service are [i]the enemy[/i].
Yes. And the problem with that is what?
If you get a typical home user account, you're paying less than people used to pay for modem access. You can't expect to get 8Mbps 24/7 for that. You know that.
If you want 24/7 full bandwidth usage, there are other pricing plans that give you that. Expect to pay 2-3x as much.
In essence, Comcast is executing a denial of service attack on their customers' traffic with a third party. That traffic does not belong to them; they merely carry it. Isn't this illegal under some sort of computer-sabotage law?
Why would it be illegal? It's their wires. It's not even a contractual violation. You signed an agreement with them which specifically prohibits you from sending P2P traffic and allows them to take any steps they like in order to protect their network.
If you want to do P2P file sharing, upgrade to a business account; they are not that much more expensive, and you can actually use your full bandwidth 24/7.
Mandating "UTF-8 only" is a very English-centric way of thinking of the problem.
No, it is not. Unicode was developed by an international group of experts, including plenty of participants from Asia. It represents a reasonable and practical compromise between lots of different design goals. Everybody had to make some sacrifices there. People like you are just trying to rattle people's cages by turning a technical issue into a nationalistic one. "GB 18030" is a China-centric standard, Unicode is a global and neutral standard.
Furthermore, to the degree that there are problems with Unicode and Asian languages, the way to address them is to fix Unicode, not for each Asian nation to fall back to some national character set.
Of course, there are plenty of political and economic incentives for nations like China and Japan to try to have their own national character sets; hopefully, organizations like the UN and WTO will recognize this for what it is: attempts at content control and attempts at erecting illegal trade barriers, and deal with it accordingly.
Google generally makes APIs available for their services, and they will likely do the same here. So, if you want an encrypted file system with Google storage, all you need is the right client.
I suspect you're going to see a Fuse-based encrypted Google file system within days of the release of the API and service.
In particular, their treatment of some Asian glyphs has some folks absolutely up in arms (cf. Han unification) and it falls short of what I'd call truly 'universal.'
The "controversy" about Han unification is inane nationalistic posturing on the part of those Asian nations; it has no basis in either linguistics or practice. It's as if every European nation wanted their own codes for the Roman alphabet.
Start mandating UTF-8 and you're going to have people breaking the standard in favor of national charsets faster than you can say "cultural imperialist."
"Han unification" is not "cultural imperialism", it's simply applying the same design principles to Chinese characters that were applied to other languages. People object to Han unification for a variety of reasons, most of them related to nationalism, arrogance, or simply ignorance. For example, there are lingering animosities between Japan and China. And many traditionalists in Asia think of the West as inferior and would have found grounds for objecting to any character set not designed domestically.
The technically correct thing to do is to keep Han unification, just like all other scripts are unified, and address problems with specific glyphs as they come up.
I think Google and Yahoo may not be the right site for this anyway. They are for-profit companies that want to (and arguably need to) do business globally and therefore will adopt a least common denominator approach: if something is illegal in Egypt, Turkey, Russia, or China, there's a good chance that it will be removed. Also, if something is contrary to popular opinion, it may well get banned.
This kind of video needs to be (1) widely circulated and archived, and (2) put in the context of human rights efforts, (3) put outside the reach of government interference. So, I'd say P2P distribution and USENET is important. In addition, human rights organizations need to do more to create on-line archives and searchable sites.
My goals began to change as I watched NASA go from the world's best research agency (IMHO) to a politically correct institution lacking any cohesive vision.
I'm sorry, you lost me here. What does "political correctness" have to do with this? NASA is implementing a directive from a Republican president to spy into people's sexual orientation under the pretext of "homeland security". That is about as politically incorrect as you can get.
To me, this sounds like the OP is a quite young programmer who is looking for a chance to lead a moral crusade rather than get the job done.
He has his head screwed on right, you don't. It's ethics it's about potentially big liabilities that you expose your company to by using source code without a license.
50 years of research on violent video games? That's a neat trick. Did they have a time machine? Or did they simply incorrectly generalize from violent TV and movies to video games?
They might in principle, but in practice, they don't. The OLPC keyboard differs from theirs, and there are decades of prior art in using multiple shift keys to reach multiple languages on one keyboard. Their keyboard is basically the "US International Keyboard" for Windows with the keys rearranged.
Maybe Konyin thinks that they invented making additional languages/scripts/special characters available via additional shift characters, but that's ridiculous; here is the Windows US International keyboard layout:
It's a common misconception that GSM phones can make analog (dial-up) modem calls directly, but they can't. GSM is digital, and analog modems will only work over analog (AMPS) cellular. The "modem" in a GSM phone actually makes a digital connection to an IWU (Inter Working Unit) located at a carrier's Mobile Switching Center (MSC). The IWU has an analog modem bank that makes the actual dial-up modem calls. If a carrier doesn't provide an IWU, then analog modem calls are not possible.
I have used my Verizon Wireless cellular phone via bluetooth serial port to my PC to call Earthlink's ISP dialup service
That's not an analog modem call going over a voice connection, it's still a data connection with some magic at the other end. So, if your account isn't enabled for that kind of data connection, it doesn't work.
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PE is used by Microsoft native code, but also by .NET. Apple's support of Java has slowed down and they may be looking for a replacement.
Furthermore, C# and CLR would be a reasonable platform for them to move to, given that Microsoft is not dogmatic about what libraries to use with the CLR; they could probably even create an Objective C to CLR compiler, giving people the choice of either running Objective C as native code or as CLR bytecodes. It would also make it easier for Windows developers to develop for Macintosh.
How prominently such support would feature in OS X would have to be seen; it might only be used for things like Silverlight, or it might become a full alternative to native development.
I think that sort of thing is called "predatory pricing": pricing something below cost in order to drive a competitor out of business. It's frowned upon in a free market, in particular when a company uses one monopoly to support predatory pricing in a different market.
Of course, given that Apple itself dominates the MP3 player market so much, I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry...
Right now, most of the 3G chipsets are still relatively bulky and draw fairly high-power
Sorry, but that's uninformed drivel.
3G and 3.5G handsets come in slivers that are a few millimeters thick and have excellent battery life:
http://www.mobilegazette.com/nokia-6500-classic-07x05x31.htm
http://ezinearticles.com/?Sony-Ericsson-W-880i-Black---Experience-the-Walkman-Phone&id=534534
Some of them even throw in WiFi. Those phones aren't even particularly expensive (about $15 for the Nokia with activation).
The US phone market is several years behind Europe technologically. In part, that's because it's so fragmented and because the US chose frequencies different from the standard ones used mostly everywhere else.
Oh, and you can get a 3.5G iPhone-like phone: the Samsung F700; it looks superb, and squeezes a full keyboard into something with roughly the same form factor and look as the iPhone:
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/cellphones/apple-iphone-vs-samsung-f700-which-is-touchscreenier-235112.php
Having abusive partners seems to be another expression of anger, an attempt to hide his anger from himself.
I don't think this is a psychological issue, I think it's a business issue. Apple has abused a number of their partners in the past, and probably the only companies willing to partner with Apple at this point are companies that are themselves used to playing hardball with their own partners. Any company who thinks of a partnership like this as a long term, mutually beneficial, cooperative relationship would probably not be talking to Apple.
Follow biotechnology much? And the boon to Computer Science / Engineering has been huge, just for a start.
Computer science/engineering in particular have made very little progress over the last decade; most of what is touted as progress now is research results from the 70's and 80's finally being implemented, combined with faster machines. That has had a lot of impact on daily life, but research has stagnated.
As for biology, there has been an explosion of new data, but little in terms of fundamentally new understanding.
Yet people elsewhere get more bandwidth for less money.
Accounting for exchange rates, the US and Europe are not all that different. And European ISPs impose similar restrictions on P2P traffic:
http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs
Why on earth is the EU funding something like this? Do they really think they'll do a better job sorting this sort of thing out than private industry?
Yes. And US history shows that they are correct: most high tech companies and inventions start out as university research; the private sector merely commercializes it.
Without lots of government funding, there would be no hightech industry.
Research existed before the web & web search, why did the web make things so much better?
Did it? I've seen less scientific progress in the last decade than in the decades before the web.
Those of you who haven't worked on the business side of an ISP may not realize this, but customers who actually use the service are [i]the enemy[/i].
Yes. And the problem with that is what?
If you get a typical home user account, you're paying less than people used to pay for modem access. You can't expect to get 8Mbps 24/7 for that. You know that.
If you want 24/7 full bandwidth usage, there are other pricing plans that give you that. Expect to pay 2-3x as much.
In essence, Comcast is executing a denial of service attack on their customers' traffic with a third party. That traffic does not belong to them; they merely carry it. Isn't this illegal under some sort of computer-sabotage law?
Why would it be illegal? It's their wires. It's not even a contractual violation. You signed an agreement with them which specifically prohibits you from sending P2P traffic and allows them to take any steps they like in order to protect their network.
If you want to do P2P file sharing, upgrade to a business account; they are not that much more expensive, and you can actually use your full bandwidth 24/7.
They are illegally interfering with their customers' service and don't have the guts to do it outright themselves.
It's their network; they can send or not send whatever packets they want.
They can also just cancel your account.
Mandating "UTF-8 only" is a very English-centric way of thinking of the problem.
No, it is not. Unicode was developed by an international group of experts, including plenty of participants from Asia. It represents a reasonable and practical compromise between lots of different design goals. Everybody had to make some sacrifices there. People like you are just trying to rattle people's cages by turning a technical issue into a nationalistic one. "GB 18030" is a China-centric standard, Unicode is a global and neutral standard.
Furthermore, to the degree that there are problems with Unicode and Asian languages, the way to address them is to fix Unicode, not for each Asian nation to fall back to some national character set.
Of course, there are plenty of political and economic incentives for nations like China and Japan to try to have their own national character sets; hopefully, organizations like the UN and WTO will recognize this for what it is: attempts at content control and attempts at erecting illegal trade barriers, and deal with it accordingly.
Google generally makes APIs available for their services, and they will likely do the same here. So, if you want an encrypted file system with Google storage, all you need is the right client.
I suspect you're going to see a Fuse-based encrypted Google file system within days of the release of the API and service.
In particular, their treatment of some Asian glyphs has some folks absolutely up in arms (cf. Han unification) and it falls short of what I'd call truly 'universal.'
The "controversy" about Han unification is inane nationalistic posturing on the part of those Asian nations; it has no basis in either linguistics or practice. It's as if every European nation wanted their own codes for the Roman alphabet.
Start mandating UTF-8 and you're going to have people breaking the standard in favor of national charsets faster than you can say "cultural imperialist."
"Han unification" is not "cultural imperialism", it's simply applying the same design principles to Chinese characters that were applied to other languages. People object to Han unification for a variety of reasons, most of them related to nationalism, arrogance, or simply ignorance. For example, there are lingering animosities between Japan and China. And many traditionalists in Asia think of the West as inferior and would have found grounds for objecting to any character set not designed domestically.
The technically correct thing to do is to keep Han unification, just like all other scripts are unified, and address problems with specific glyphs as they come up.
I think Google and Yahoo may not be the right site for this anyway. They are for-profit companies that want to (and arguably need to) do business globally and therefore will adopt a least common denominator approach: if something is illegal in Egypt, Turkey, Russia, or China, there's a good chance that it will be removed. Also, if something is contrary to popular opinion, it may well get banned.
This kind of video needs to be (1) widely circulated and archived, and (2) put in the context of human rights efforts, (3) put outside the reach of government interference. So, I'd say P2P distribution and USENET is important. In addition, human rights organizations need to do more to create on-line archives and searchable sites.
My goals began to change as I watched NASA go from the world's best research agency (IMHO) to a politically correct institution lacking any cohesive vision.
I'm sorry, you lost me here. What does "political correctness" have to do with this? NASA is implementing a directive from a Republican president to spy into people's sexual orientation under the pretext of "homeland security". That is about as politically incorrect as you can get.
It lets you permanently remove search results you don't want to see.
Oh, you're so much smarter than the developers at Google! I bet they never thought of that!
To me, this sounds like the OP is a quite young programmer who is looking for a chance to lead a moral crusade rather than get the job done.
He has his head screwed on right, you don't. It's ethics it's about potentially big liabilities that you expose your company to by using source code without a license.
After reviewing more than 50 years of research
50 years of research on violent video games? That's a neat trick. Did they have a time machine? Or did they simply incorrectly generalize from violent TV and movies to video games?
That would require withdrawing from the Berne Convention, and in turn the TRIPS agreements, and in turn the World Trade Organization.
If those organizations do not permit making changes to bad laws, then they ought to be dissolved; registration-free copyrights are bad.
would withdrawing from the WTO be a wise move for even those parts of the United States economy unconnected to copyright?
It might be a wise move in any case; the WTO has failed to fulfill its mission of promoting free trade.
They might actually have a point
They might in principle, but in practice, they don't. The OLPC keyboard differs from theirs, and there are decades of prior art in using multiple shift keys to reach multiple languages on one keyboard. Their keyboard is basically the "US International Keyboard" for Windows with the keys rearranged.
Here is the US international layout for OLPC:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Keyboard_layouts
Here is the Konyin layout for the US (you have to click on VIEW LAYOUT under UNITED STATES):
http://www.konyin.com/?page=home&menuitem=1
Maybe Konyin thinks that they invented making additional languages/scripts/special characters available via additional shift characters, but that's ridiculous; here is the Windows US International keyboard layout:
http://www.usna.edu/LangStudy/US-InternationalLayout.html
See, lots of special characters via AltGr.
I have used my Verizon Wireless cellular phone via bluetooth serial port to my PC to call Earthlink's ISP dialup service
That's not an analog modem call going over a voice connection, it's still a data connection with some magic at the other end. So, if your account isn't enabled for that kind of data connection, it doesn't work.