Wikileaks seems to have a very crude (and some would argue wholly unintelligent) sense of right and wrong. Their philosophy lacks any nuance - all they seems to trump is that everything and anything should be published. If anyone says otherwise then they start screaming like an impudent 5 year old - CENSORSHIP - CENSORSHIP - I AM BEING GAGGED - THIS IS SUPPRESSION - THIS IS AN OUTRAGE.
Some of what they put out has a rightful place to enable anonymous whistleblowing. However they seem to be unable to discriminate between something that is rightful and something that is completely wrong. They will eventually find themselves far far on the wrong side of the law and will disappear. The shame in that is that the route for anonymous whistleblowing will then have been removed due to their inability to make good judgements.
The history (and part of the reason for its success) of google's ad business has been that the ads they serve *aren't* annoying. No flashing banner ads, no "punch the monkey to win a prize", just small clean fonted textural links. That being the case I would be very surprised if they implement this patent as read - they are too smart to do something that daft.
The problem of delivering advertising with digital video is a real one for online activities, so I don't doubt google are working on it - but what is guaranteed is that they know if they annoy people then they will just go elsewhere.
For OLEDs refresh rates aren't a problem, patterning is. I presume this roll to roll technique is for lighting, as lighting panels don't require high precision deposition, just fire on the layers in a big mixture and go. When you move towards displays then you want very precise RGB pixels, patterned in a specific way, and a resolution of HD. For evaporation deposition that requires a shadow mask and 3 separate events for each colour. Shadow masks are a pain.
The reason Sony have only managed an 11" OLED display (and at $1500 they are still making a loss) is due to the difficulties of pattering it all (and getting good consistency). For GE and white light it is much much more straight forward. Whack on the layers, connect it up and go - they don't need to worry about any patterns. In the longer term solution processable OLEDs would substantially improve things. Solution processable means inkjet deposition (just like home printers), which means fine control of deposition and the ability to run with a roll to roll techniques. Solution processability is a few years away, however.
They don't. There is a great deal of FUD floating about - it strikes me that everyone who operates in the "real world" - i.e. the "money money money profit profit profit" world are salivating at how much they could make out of wikipedia - they certainly don't have the projects best interests at heart - just their own. Lines from the article state that "only a third of what is needed" was raised - then completely contradict themselves by saying next "For the rest, foundation directors have to hit up outside donors" - right - so they actually raised all they need through donors - the journalist was just making some non-existent division to enable them to come away with the sensationalist line that only a third of what is needed has been raised. Bad journalism.
The budgets balance - until wikimedia comes to the table and says in a frank manner "we need more money or we need to cut back" then there is no need for sensationalist stories. At the moment projects are encouraged to use as much resource as they want. There is no limit on images or videos uploaded to the commons, or any movement to restrict or be frugal.
The super delegates will decide it all - the actual raw numbers don't make much difference. Winning Ohio and Texas wasn't important to Clinton due to the number of delegates she would win, but rather has very strongly reinforced the stall she is going to set out to the supers, namely "I win in the "big" states, Obama wins in the "little" states". A piece in the NYT laid it all out yesterday, pointing out that if she lost both Texas & Ohio it wouldn't make a vast difference to the numbers - due to PR - but it would leave her with virtually no storyline to present to the supers. Since she won them she has now quite a potent storyline to present - and it may end up handing her the title.
... who called Linux a "cancer". Somehow I imagine what he has to say about Linux is neither going to be informed, balanced or interesting, just more deluded BS from the king of deluded BS.
Quote from the link you provide:
Nash previously served as corporate vice president of the Security Technology Unit (STU), where he led Microsoft's efforts to provide customers with a more secure platform. Nash's work on security was instrumental in helping the company's vision to establish trust in computing to realize the full potential of an interconnected world. Was he promoted or demoted from there to his current position then? (bearing in mind that his current title of "Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management" is just a load of Dilbert pulp that means nothing).
This is available on the condition that the uses are non-commercial:
It also promised not to sue open source developers for making that software available for non-commercial use. source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7257411.stm
If they want to use it commercially then they get sued. This type of news, coupled with yesterdays student IDE give-away is cast iron indication MS is worried by the FOSS world - of course they are attempting to defeat them with these measures while still securing their commercial revenue streams - having their cake and eating it.
I am sceptical if it will work though - the commercial business end of the spectrum have previously shown themselves more likely to make the shift away from MS products - it is the home market that is much more entrenched.
if they signed (individually) a paper that they will not say anything against the regime? That is not what the "paper" said. Indeed the "paper" is a contract all UK Olympic athletes have had to sign for the last 20 odd years, and all it is is a reaffirmation of some of the rules they are all bound by anyway. The purpose of it is to ensure the athletes are fully aware of the rules so they cannot plead ignorance if they break them, as they have signed a contract. In the case of the extra text that was added to the contract for the 2008 games, it was simply a reaffirmation of the rule that political protests by athletes at Olympic venues is unacceptable. It was nothing about an inability to criticise "the regime", or anything like it. The media picked up this story and just made up what they didn't know (or didn't want to know) - 2008 Olympic "rights" stories (whether true or only half true) are good column filler, and will be for the next 6 months.
And that said regime has, instead of improving, further cracked down on human rights and democracy activists? No disagreement from me. I can see the way this is all shaping up that the games may be a disaster for China - they thought everyone (inside & outside the country) would hush up an not make a big fuss for the sake of "the games" - quite the opposite is the case - if I were Amnesty International or any one of the other HR organisations I would be preparing for a multitude of high profile demonstrations and action around the games. Unfurling of a Free Tibet banner inside the Olympic Stadium - how will they respond? Tank Man part II would be a disaster for their "all is good in China" message. I think China hoped that everyone would just not cause any trouble, much like a family argument would be swept under the carpet if relatives come round - I can't see it happening. That being the case, the only good thing that may come out of this is that it might force wholesale reform.
Don't know how parent got modded as insightful.
A lot of WP articles have been copied from websites (or textbooks). In traditional publishing, this would be a serious transgression - but in WP lets it slide. Show us the money. List the pages here - better yet, go to the pages, remove the content, and post on the talk page showing the original source to indicate it is copyright. If it is a whole article then stick the {{copyvio}} tag on it and delete the content - the page will get deleted. Your comments are not just wrong - they are plain wrong - wikipedia doesn't have a tolerance for copyright violations, even to the extent that "fair use" claims on images are very tight and open to challenge at any moment.
The advantage that WP has in this regard is that its authors are anonymous - they can not be prosecuted for copyright infringement. That would be also a lot of junk. There have been a number of cases where people have posted (what prosecutors argued was libellous) material on wikipedia - the authors, whether IP addresses or registered users were identified through the correct legal means and cases were brought to court. You are anonymous virtually nowhere on the net - and indeed even less so on a high profile site like wikipedia. If I post libellous comments on some backwater website about someone it is unlikely to ever be drawn to the attention of the person - it I do it on a biography page on wikipedia it will not only be noticed, but will be openly logged. Copyvio's are exactly the same - if the copyright owners wish to identify any material then they are not only free to do so, but wikipedia actively encourages it by making the methods clear. In reality, such as with the book on Oil resources published in the summer (full of entire passages lifted from wikipedia that was not referenced) the reveres is more likely true these days.
Wikipedia is no saint, and there are plenty of problems with regard to inherent bias, POV campaigns, unreliable information and cabal editing - but the one thing that can't be levelled at it as you have done is that it is some "nobody cares about copyright" site, quite the opposite is the case.
You may be right - and 60 was broadly at the upper limit (I would guess 50 odd is more likely). But I just have a bit of a feeling on this - if MS keeps giving off the signals of desperation about *wanting* Yahoo so much - to the extent that this has all been a tiny step away from being a hostile - then the institutional shareholders might think twice. If they judge that MS are stupid enough to go as high as $45 a share then they certainly aren't going to cave too soon. So far MS has played this as an "all in" hand - such that they are risking the institutionals calling their bluff.
Of course they would. MS has made it plain they want the company, and would not give up easily - those statements made with far less subtlety than you would normally find in takeover bids (short of outright hostiles).
Yahoo have nothing to loose in attempting to shake a couple more dollars out of MS. It was a 62% premium on the back of a weak Yahoo boardroom who don't know what they are doing, coupled with poor recently reported results. It is nowhere near a 62% premium on the real worth of the company (when viewed in the context of what it is worth to MS - and ultimately in terms of worth; something is only worth what someone else is willing to pay).
MS (and given we know who is solely in charge of this, Ballmer) have made a ham fist out of this - the only way they are likely to get Yahoo now is by a hostile - and the current Yahoo share price indicates that is going to cost them a lot of money (and if the markets judge that MS will pay any price then MS could end up paying ridiculous sums to buy the stake they require as it would turn into a bull run).
Yahoo would have been daft to accept as it was. The position they have taken (if correct) is the obvious line - "massively undervalues". The ball is firmly back in MS's end of the court - they will be forced to put themselves into substantial debt trying to force a hostile takeover (aren't MS sharholders going to love that on - yeah go ahead and piss away our 19B cash pile for a failing company) - or give up on it and look like a coward. Ballmer always likes to play the big man - it will be interesting to see how big he reacts to this. Depending on how obsessed he is about getting his own way this could end up making the AOL Time Warner debacle look like a minor business misdemeanour decision. 60B would be a out-of-thin-air figure I could see this ending up at - that would be absolutely hilarious.
The other main option, namely attempt a takeover by proxy by trying to fill the Yahoo board has now (broadly) been nullified. If the current board is taking a position that will (if the takeover happens) make YH shareholders more money then they are not going to vote on MS stooges who would immediately accept the MS offer.
A more recent version that I always remember was from the UK satirical news quiz HIGNFY. When covering the story of the Miss World contest that had to be abandoned in Nigeria and quickly held in London due to Muslim protesters. Team Captain on HIGNFY Ian Hislop commented, "for us, Miss World is about 30 years out of date, for them it is about 500 years ahead of its time"
That is what the question boils down to. Obviously any reasonable person sees that in this case the "freedom of religious belief" can not overrule the "freedom of expression", while those with hard line Islamic beliefs cannot accept that. A page and step by step guide exists specifically to walk people through how to block images on the page if they do not want to view them (or allow their families to view them). What quite a few of the protesters want is nothing to do with that though - they don't want *anyone*, whether Muslim or not, to view them.
I rather fear with a lot of the people so heavily protesting - not only about this, but going to much more extreme lengths in many different spheres of the world today - is that they are being whipped up into a FUD storm. As the NYT piece points out, prior to the 20th century, illustrative depictions of Muhammed were not at all taboo. The folks "protesting" here act like it is the central tenant of their entire religion. We have an entire generation of people, across the Muslim world who are unhappy, they are easy to whip up into a storm of protest over ridiculously inconsequential things (and in a few rare cases seriously consequential things) - it is done at the bequest of "leaders", leaders of religion or country, who use these people as tools. Whip them up into a frenzy so they won't question why they are so poor, disillusioned, powerless or poorly educated themselves - for if they did that the leaders privileged powerful lives would disintegrate.
He is now in the driving seat. While MS have always bumbled along with things I now see this getting a bit personal and a bit more precarious. Ballmer is an interesting character. A lot on here (probably rightly) have characterised him as mental. He seems like a deranged and obsessed guy. I mentioned MS "bumbling" along because that is what they did under Gates (sure they embraced, extinguished), but they never took vast risks. Now that Ballmer is in charge I can't shake the feeling that MS's future is a lot more risky - for Ballmer's personal obsession with "destroying" Google could take MS into a very different neighbourhood from Gate's more careful approach. Ballmer is now starting to risk the family silver on beating Google. You only have to look at the comments from the conference call yesterday to realise it - "The market continues to grow, and the leader continues to consolidate position," - never mentioned them by name, but he is clearly obsessed about Google - if I were a shareholder I would be worried that his personal obsession is impairing his business decisions.
Unfortunately femtosecond lasers aren't cheap - the one used in this work would I guestimate cost ~ $1M US.
I have to be honest, reading the paper it is just, odd. It is not the results that are odd or anything like that, but it is just a bit flaky. They start off wittering on about Alchemy & turning base metal into gold (even referencing it) - then concede the aren't doing anything like that at all (this is an academic paper - wittering is not good). Details are light (ok, it is a letter) and in general it seems to be written in a off-the-cuff style.
I would have thought that they wouldn't or couldn't care less who or what disagrees with them so long as they got the bits of ISO paper they need so they can claim that they are "an international standard". Have they done a quick back-of-the-envelope tot up of the numbers for the vote (even at this stage)? Do they anticipate that they will fail and are getting their excuses and blames in early?
Which was precisely why I mentioned the consumer environment. I am sure top secret business deals aren't discussed via MSN - but they constitute a tiny (if not virtually non-existent) amount of IM traffic - the point of debate was whether XMMP is widespread - the point beyond contention is that in terms of traffic volumes it isn't, specific setups involving discussion about mergers of coca cola and pepsi aside.
I'm sure they are used - but if you want to look at raw numbers (and especially in a "consumer" environment) then the numbers from the proprietary closed non-XMPP networks dwarfs everything else.
The other replies have correctly highlighted XMPP. What your question really gets at is *why* this hasn't been widely adopted. The basic answer is the moneterization of the internet - commercial exploitation, not only for the purposes of making money, but of attempting to control the underlying network structure to exclude competitors.
I think the most frightening thought of all is what would the net be like if it was designed from the ground up by the likes of MS & AOL a decade ago. In reality they just built on what was already there - a consequence which means that I can successfully, efficiently and easily email you no matter what ISP or OS you have. If the likes of MS had been given the opportunity to control these services then the internet today would be a truly appalling place - think of the IM mess branched out to *every* protocol. Email, http, ftp. It is just an unfortunate consequence that IM wasn't as accepted when MS, AOL, Yahoo et al were building their services - hence they all got greedy. The result? The result is always what happens when rampant greed goes unchecked - the customer gets shafted because the shareholders are all that matter.
It depends on the show.
Timewatch on BBC2 has been on for the last couple of weeks - one on Omaha beach & one on the viking ship sailing around Scotland. Neither of those were repeated, or will be (for some unspecific number of years on the BBC until they have some time to fill at 2am).
The journalist should have visited using a linux livecd. If the site hosts mac malware then it is a pretty good bet they already have established "businesses" in the field of windows malware.
NYT covers the issue well. What struck me from reading it was the impression that Google do have a quick turn around on an idea and an ultrafast motivated and reactive set of employees. While reading the section on Grand Prix I couldn't help but imagine what the development path would have been for such an idea at MS - weekly meetings with 4th tier of management, monthly reports for the 3rd tier of management, quarterly presentations for the second tier of management - then a year into the cycle 1st tier find out about the project and bin it as balmer has been hurling some chairs about and he wants to copy something google or yahoo did 6 months ago.
What also struck me was the tired old soundbites from MS representatives - "The focus is on competitive self-interest; it's on trying to undermine Microsoft, rather than what customers want to do," says Mr. Raikes of Google. Yeah Raikes - your development cycle (or rather complete lack of it for 3+ years after you had destroyed Netscape) on IE fits that quote very nicely. The words from MS all sound a bit wooden - they are trying to come out with all the "we are cool" "googleplex" mentality of roller blading employees who are living the dream - but it doesn't stick - we know how things go on in MS land - the coder who spent a couple of years jumping through bureaucratic hoops of reviews, reports and presentations to simply code the log off button on the start menu for vista tells us that. Gabe Newell got it spot on - MS has become what IBM was when MS were starting up - one vast bureaucracy - MS chided IBM in those days just as Google can rightfully do of MS today. I don't think Gabe extended the analogy, but it fits perfectly that IBM were attempting to cling on to the last of the "mainframe days" back then, just as MS are attempting to cling on to the "standalone desktop days" now. We are entering another paradigm shift - and the more MS say that we aren't the more it confirms that we are.
Slashdot Mirror
Wikileaks seems to have a very crude (and some would argue wholly unintelligent) sense of right and wrong. Their philosophy lacks any nuance - all they seems to trump is that everything and anything should be published. If anyone says otherwise then they start screaming like an impudent 5 year old - CENSORSHIP - CENSORSHIP - I AM BEING GAGGED - THIS IS SUPPRESSION - THIS IS AN OUTRAGE.
Some of what they put out has a rightful place to enable anonymous whistleblowing. However they seem to be unable to discriminate between something that is rightful and something that is completely wrong. They will eventually find themselves far far on the wrong side of the law and will disappear. The shame in that is that the route for anonymous whistleblowing will then have been removed due to their inability to make good judgements.
The history (and part of the reason for its success) of google's ad business has been that the ads they serve *aren't* annoying. No flashing banner ads, no "punch the monkey to win a prize", just small clean fonted textural links. That being the case I would be very surprised if they implement this patent as read - they are too smart to do something that daft.
The problem of delivering advertising with digital video is a real one for online activities, so I don't doubt google are working on it - but what is guaranteed is that they know if they annoy people then they will just go elsewhere.
For OLEDs refresh rates aren't a problem, patterning is. I presume this roll to roll technique is for lighting, as lighting panels don't require high precision deposition, just fire on the layers in a big mixture and go. When you move towards displays then you want very precise RGB pixels, patterned in a specific way, and a resolution of HD. For evaporation deposition that requires a shadow mask and 3 separate events for each colour. Shadow masks are a pain.
The reason Sony have only managed an 11" OLED display (and at $1500 they are still making a loss) is due to the difficulties of pattering it all (and getting good consistency). For GE and white light it is much much more straight forward. Whack on the layers, connect it up and go - they don't need to worry about any patterns. In the longer term solution processable OLEDs would substantially improve things. Solution processable means inkjet deposition (just like home printers), which means fine control of deposition and the ability to run with a roll to roll techniques. Solution processability is a few years away, however.
They don't. There is a great deal of FUD floating about - it strikes me that everyone who operates in the "real world" - i.e. the "money money money profit profit profit" world are salivating at how much they could make out of wikipedia - they certainly don't have the projects best interests at heart - just their own. Lines from the article state that "only a third of what is needed" was raised - then completely contradict themselves by saying next "For the rest, foundation directors have to hit up outside donors" - right - so they actually raised all they need through donors - the journalist was just making some non-existent division to enable them to come away with the sensationalist line that only a third of what is needed has been raised. Bad journalism.
The budgets balance - until wikimedia comes to the table and says in a frank manner "we need more money or we need to cut back" then there is no need for sensationalist stories. At the moment projects are encouraged to use as much resource as they want. There is no limit on images or videos uploaded to the commons, or any movement to restrict or be frugal.
The super delegates will decide it all - the actual raw numbers don't make much difference. Winning Ohio and Texas wasn't important to Clinton due to the number of delegates she would win, but rather has very strongly reinforced the stall she is going to set out to the supers, namely "I win in the "big" states, Obama wins in the "little" states". A piece in the NYT laid it all out yesterday, pointing out that if she lost both Texas & Ohio it wouldn't make a vast difference to the numbers - due to PR - but it would leave her with virtually no storyline to present to the supers. Since she won them she has now quite a potent storyline to present - and it may end up handing her the title.
... who called Linux a "cancer". Somehow I imagine what he has to say about Linux is neither going to be informed, balanced or interesting, just more deluded BS from the king of deluded BS.
If they want to use it commercially then they get sued. This type of news, coupled with yesterdays student IDE give-away is cast iron indication MS is worried by the FOSS world - of course they are attempting to defeat them with these measures while still securing their commercial revenue streams - having their cake and eating it.
I am sceptical if it will work though - the commercial business end of the spectrum have previously shown themselves more likely to make the shift away from MS products - it is the home market that is much more entrenched.
And that said regime has, instead of improving, further cracked down on human rights and democracy activists? No disagreement from me. I can see the way this is all shaping up that the games may be a disaster for China - they thought everyone (inside & outside the country) would hush up an not make a big fuss for the sake of "the games" - quite the opposite is the case - if I were Amnesty International or any one of the other HR organisations I would be preparing for a multitude of high profile demonstrations and action around the games. Unfurling of a Free Tibet banner inside the Olympic Stadium - how will they respond? Tank Man part II would be a disaster for their "all is good in China" message. I think China hoped that everyone would just not cause any trouble, much like a family argument would be swept under the carpet if relatives come round - I can't see it happening. That being the case, the only good thing that may come out of this is that it might force wholesale reform.
A lot of WP articles have been copied from websites (or textbooks). In traditional publishing, this would be a serious transgression - but in WP lets it slide. Show us the money. List the pages here - better yet, go to the pages, remove the content, and post on the talk page showing the original source to indicate it is copyright. If it is a whole article then stick the {{copyvio}} tag on it and delete the content - the page will get deleted. Your comments are not just wrong - they are plain wrong - wikipedia doesn't have a tolerance for copyright violations, even to the extent that "fair use" claims on images are very tight and open to challenge at any moment.
The advantage that WP has in this regard is that its authors are anonymous - they can not be prosecuted for copyright infringement. That would be also a lot of junk. There have been a number of cases where people have posted (what prosecutors argued was libellous) material on wikipedia - the authors, whether IP addresses or registered users were identified through the correct legal means and cases were brought to court. You are anonymous virtually nowhere on the net - and indeed even less so on a high profile site like wikipedia. If I post libellous comments on some backwater website about someone it is unlikely to ever be drawn to the attention of the person - it I do it on a biography page on wikipedia it will not only be noticed, but will be openly logged. Copyvio's are exactly the same - if the copyright owners wish to identify any material then they are not only free to do so, but wikipedia actively encourages it by making the methods clear. In reality, such as with the book on Oil resources published in the summer (full of entire passages lifted from wikipedia that was not referenced) the reveres is more likely true these days.
Wikipedia is no saint, and there are plenty of problems with regard to inherent bias, POV campaigns, unreliable information and cabal editing - but the one thing that can't be levelled at it as you have done is that it is some "nobody cares about copyright" site, quite the opposite is the case.
You may be right - and 60 was broadly at the upper limit (I would guess 50 odd is more likely). But I just have a bit of a feeling on this - if MS keeps giving off the signals of desperation about *wanting* Yahoo so much - to the extent that this has all been a tiny step away from being a hostile - then the institutional shareholders might think twice. If they judge that MS are stupid enough to go as high as $45 a share then they certainly aren't going to cave too soon. So far MS has played this as an "all in" hand - such that they are risking the institutionals calling their bluff.
Of course they would. MS has made it plain they want the company, and would not give up easily - those statements made with far less subtlety than you would normally find in takeover bids (short of outright hostiles).
Yahoo have nothing to loose in attempting to shake a couple more dollars out of MS. It was a 62% premium on the back of a weak Yahoo boardroom who don't know what they are doing, coupled with poor recently reported results. It is nowhere near a 62% premium on the real worth of the company (when viewed in the context of what it is worth to MS - and ultimately in terms of worth; something is only worth what someone else is willing to pay).
MS (and given we know who is solely in charge of this, Ballmer) have made a ham fist out of this - the only way they are likely to get Yahoo now is by a hostile - and the current Yahoo share price indicates that is going to cost them a lot of money (and if the markets judge that MS will pay any price then MS could end up paying ridiculous sums to buy the stake they require as it would turn into a bull run).
Yahoo would have been daft to accept as it was. The position they have taken (if correct) is the obvious line - "massively undervalues". The ball is firmly back in MS's end of the court - they will be forced to put themselves into substantial debt trying to force a hostile takeover (aren't MS sharholders going to love that on - yeah go ahead and piss away our 19B cash pile for a failing company) - or give up on it and look like a coward. Ballmer always likes to play the big man - it will be interesting to see how big he reacts to this. Depending on how obsessed he is about getting his own way this could end up making the AOL Time Warner debacle look like a minor business misdemeanour decision. 60B would be a out-of-thin-air figure I could see this ending up at - that would be absolutely hilarious.
The other main option, namely attempt a takeover by proxy by trying to fill the Yahoo board has now (broadly) been nullified. If the current board is taking a position that will (if the takeover happens) make YH shareholders more money then they are not going to vote on MS stooges who would immediately accept the MS offer.
A more recent version that I always remember was from the UK satirical news quiz HIGNFY. When covering the story of the Miss World contest that had to be abandoned in Nigeria and quickly held in London due to Muslim protesters. Team Captain on HIGNFY Ian Hislop commented, "for us, Miss World is about 30 years out of date, for them it is about 500 years ahead of its time"
That is what the question boils down to. Obviously any reasonable person sees that in this case the "freedom of religious belief" can not overrule the "freedom of expression", while those with hard line Islamic beliefs cannot accept that. A page and step by step guide exists specifically to walk people through how to block images on the page if they do not want to view them (or allow their families to view them). What quite a few of the protesters want is nothing to do with that though - they don't want *anyone*, whether Muslim or not, to view them.
I rather fear with a lot of the people so heavily protesting - not only about this, but going to much more extreme lengths in many different spheres of the world today - is that they are being whipped up into a FUD storm. As the NYT piece points out, prior to the 20th century, illustrative depictions of Muhammed were not at all taboo. The folks "protesting" here act like it is the central tenant of their entire religion. We have an entire generation of people, across the Muslim world who are unhappy, they are easy to whip up into a storm of protest over ridiculously inconsequential things (and in a few rare cases seriously consequential things) - it is done at the bequest of "leaders", leaders of religion or country, who use these people as tools. Whip them up into a frenzy so they won't question why they are so poor, disillusioned, powerless or poorly educated themselves - for if they did that the leaders privileged powerful lives would disintegrate.
He is now in the driving seat. While MS have always bumbled along with things I now see this getting a bit personal and a bit more precarious. Ballmer is an interesting character. A lot on here (probably rightly) have characterised him as mental. He seems like a deranged and obsessed guy. I mentioned MS "bumbling" along because that is what they did under Gates (sure they embraced, extinguished), but they never took vast risks. Now that Ballmer is in charge I can't shake the feeling that MS's future is a lot more risky - for Ballmer's personal obsession with "destroying" Google could take MS into a very different neighbourhood from Gate's more careful approach. Ballmer is now starting to risk the family silver on beating Google. You only have to look at the comments from the conference call yesterday to realise it - "The market continues to grow, and the leader continues to consolidate position," - never mentioned them by name, but he is clearly obsessed about Google - if I were a shareholder I would be worried that his personal obsession is impairing his business decisions.
Unfortunately femtosecond lasers aren't cheap - the one used in this work would I guestimate cost ~ $1M US.
I have to be honest, reading the paper it is just, odd. It is not the results that are odd or anything like that, but it is just a bit flaky. They start off wittering on about Alchemy & turning base metal into gold (even referencing it) - then concede the aren't doing anything like that at all (this is an academic paper - wittering is not good). Details are light (ok, it is a letter) and in general it seems to be written in a off-the-cuff style.
I would have thought that they wouldn't or couldn't care less who or what disagrees with them so long as they got the bits of ISO paper they need so they can claim that they are "an international standard". Have they done a quick back-of-the-envelope tot up of the numbers for the vote (even at this stage)? Do they anticipate that they will fail and are getting their excuses and blames in early?
Which was precisely why I mentioned the consumer environment. I am sure top secret business deals aren't discussed via MSN - but they constitute a tiny (if not virtually non-existent) amount of IM traffic - the point of debate was whether XMMP is widespread - the point beyond contention is that in terms of traffic volumes it isn't, specific setups involving discussion about mergers of coca cola and pepsi aside.
I'm sure they are used - but if you want to look at raw numbers (and especially in a "consumer" environment) then the numbers from the proprietary closed non-XMPP networks dwarfs everything else.
The other replies have correctly highlighted XMPP. What your question really gets at is *why* this hasn't been widely adopted. The basic answer is the moneterization of the internet - commercial exploitation, not only for the purposes of making money, but of attempting to control the underlying network structure to exclude competitors.
I think the most frightening thought of all is what would the net be like if it was designed from the ground up by the likes of MS & AOL a decade ago. In reality they just built on what was already there - a consequence which means that I can successfully, efficiently and easily email you no matter what ISP or OS you have. If the likes of MS had been given the opportunity to control these services then the internet today would be a truly appalling place - think of the IM mess branched out to *every* protocol. Email, http, ftp. It is just an unfortunate consequence that IM wasn't as accepted when MS, AOL, Yahoo et al were building their services - hence they all got greedy. The result? The result is always what happens when rampant greed goes unchecked - the customer gets shafted because the shareholders are all that matter.
It depends on the show. Timewatch on BBC2 has been on for the last couple of weeks - one on Omaha beach & one on the viking ship sailing around Scotland. Neither of those were repeated, or will be (for some unspecific number of years on the BBC until they have some time to fill at 2am).
The journalist should have visited using a linux livecd. If the site hosts mac malware then it is a pretty good bet they already have established "businesses" in the field of windows malware.
NYT covers the issue well. What struck me from reading it was the impression that Google do have a quick turn around on an idea and an ultrafast motivated and reactive set of employees. While reading the section on Grand Prix I couldn't help but imagine what the development path would have been for such an idea at MS - weekly meetings with 4th tier of management, monthly reports for the 3rd tier of management, quarterly presentations for the second tier of management - then a year into the cycle 1st tier find out about the project and bin it as balmer has been hurling some chairs about and he wants to copy something google or yahoo did 6 months ago.
What also struck me was the tired old soundbites from MS representatives - "The focus is on competitive self-interest; it's on trying to undermine Microsoft, rather than what customers want to do," says Mr. Raikes of Google. Yeah Raikes - your development cycle (or rather complete lack of it for 3+ years after you had destroyed Netscape) on IE fits that quote very nicely. The words from MS all sound a bit wooden - they are trying to come out with all the "we are cool" "googleplex" mentality of roller blading employees who are living the dream - but it doesn't stick - we know how things go on in MS land - the coder who spent a couple of years jumping through bureaucratic hoops of reviews, reports and presentations to simply code the log off button on the start menu for vista tells us that. Gabe Newell got it spot on - MS has become what IBM was when MS were starting up - one vast bureaucracy - MS chided IBM in those days just as Google can rightfully do of MS today. I don't think Gabe extended the analogy, but it fits perfectly that IBM were attempting to cling on to the last of the "mainframe days" back then, just as MS are attempting to cling on to the "standalone desktop days" now. We are entering another paradigm shift - and the more MS say that we aren't the more it confirms that we are.