If America was to stop all Chinese imports immediately - maybe even over a year - you would see hyperinflation. The price of some of the goods you take for granted would sky rocket. And this crap about China stealing all the jobs in America/Europe is bull. Most Americans or Europeans don't want to be doing the jobs that go East anyway.
I take offence at that comment:P It has be proven over and over again that the Black Country/Brummie accent is far superior to other accents on the British Isles.
A simplified version will generally not be received well - especially for Indic scripts. Although I'm not familiar with Bengali, in Gurmukhi there are no large rendering problems.
I suppose you should check the status of Pango/ICU if you're using Gnome and see how well Bengali is supported. I know there was lots of discussion with problems with Bengali up to a few months ago on the Unicode Indic mailing list. Windows has only just got support in service pack 2!
Untrue. All South Indian languages use Unicode for encoding, and yet, none of their scripts are based on Devnaagri.
I was referring to the fact that all scripts are based on Devanagari in the way that they are processed. I'm not sure about South Indian scripts, but Gurmukhi has certain peculiarities (e.g. Halant, Addak Bindi) which are unused in the script. For example, Halant is never used in Gurmukhi - detecting when an inherent 'a' is dropped is up to the reader.
Now, I can't read Gurmukhi myself, so I'm not sure what you mean by independent vowels being unnatural. Are you saying that Gurmukhi doesn't use the vowels 'a', 'aa', 'i', 'ii' etc seperately?
To the contrary. It uses independent vowels as much as any Indic language. However they are constructed using three special vowel barer characters (Ura, Era and Iri). Depedent vowels are then attached to these characters to make independent vowels. They should have been encoded by using the base characters and allowing users to manually add a vowel - not by using precomposed characters.
That said, I still believe ISCII is the most optimal solution we have at hand for Indic language computing, and that, since the only real block now is on a uniform standard, it's best if the developer community not go back on internationally agreed standards.
I agree that of all the existing 'standards' ISCII was by far the best and most scientific in its approach to Indian scripts. However I still feel there were deficiencies and that ISCII compatibility should not have been a major requirement for Unicode - it just wasn't and isn't used enough.
I think the largest problem with India bridging the divide with Linux is (or was) poor language support. Thank fully these problems have been slowly addressed using Unicode.
However there are still issues outstanding. All the major Indian scripts encoded using Unicode are based on Devanagari (used to write Hindi and other languages). This has caused headaches for some scripts and has made other scripts unneccessarily complex. Take for example Gurmukhi (the script used to write Punjabi) - Gurmukhi is a simple script and doesn't have the complexities involved in some other Indic scripts. However to maintain compatibility with other scripts, independent vowels are encoded seperately which is unnatural for Gurmukhi. This causes problems with typing and adds and extra layer of complexity.
As the author of the Punjabi Computing Resource Centre I have actively been looking into such issues (others exist). However as I see it, we have been forced to accept a standard that hasn't been fully thought out for individual Indian scripts. It is a standard we can live with, but is not perfect. A lot can be blamed on ISCII!
Try this for size: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4129 579.stm.
"The United States has promised $15m in immediate aid and has said more will follow. The European Union has pledged $40.5m."
In addition, EU member states make their own contributions.
2G networks in the UK cover 99% of the population. This includes big sparse areas and motorways. The only real problems you get are when going underground or in tunnels. Other than that, coverage is pretty good on Vodafone, O2 and Orange. T-Mobile lacks a bit, but is still not bad.
3G phones can automatically fallback to 2G when there is no 3G reception. As such, you can use your phone pretty much everywhere. You can only use video calling and high-bandwidth apps in the 3G area though.
Also odd that both feature the Queen Of England but are not english currency.
Well, the "Queen of England" also happens to be the Queen of Australia and the Queen of Canada. She still remains the head of state of quite a few countries around the world.
Here in the UK, broadcasters generally don't censor brands on-screen. However, lots of programmes from the US have bits censored just about everywhere. For example, take some of the programmes on MTV like Jackass or The Osbournes. Initially I thought it was just to censor rude words or nudity... but it obviously wasn't. British MTV programmes don't have the same level of censorship.
It actually gets very annoying after a while. Especially when you're not used to it.
Try getting your computer to play MPEG-4 Video at that sort of resolution. You'll need something close to a 2.8GHz PC with something a bit more powerful than a GeForce 2.
In the UK, ATMs that are part of the Link network are generally free to all participating banks. So, even though I'm a HSBC user, I can use HSBC, Natwest, Lloyds TSB, Halifax etc. ATMs for free. The only time you ever really need to pay to use ATMs is for the private ones in clubs and bars and for building societies.
When I was living in University accommodation, I had a 100mbit ethernet connection to the web. Of that, the maximum I ever uploaded on P2P was 6000KBytes/sec. The maximum I ever downloaded at (on P2P networks) was 500KBytes/sec. The maximum constant speed was 100KBytes/sec and even then, it wasn't that often.
I just don't know where all my upstream went... Damn leechers.
My memory of secondary school English lessons may be lacking - but erm, aren't trademarks generally nouns? Google is certainly a noun as are all brand names.:D
A patent is simply there to encourage innovation - which they do in the short term. However, because they last up to 20 years (which IMHO is too long), by the time the patents have run out, the device/technology is usually outdated. It works as a way to block competition (although this isn't ALWAYS the case).
I like how you put words into my mouth - where did I say there were too many patents?
And yes - it's DAMNED easy for billion dollar multi-nationals to get patents. Compare that to the average Joe who might have a really good worked out idea but can't afford the thousands of pounds required to patent it.
And back to the point - neither copyright nor patents are required in a truely market-driven capitalist economy. In fact, I'd say theoretically that they are detrimental to a market-drive economy.
Copyright is in no way an essential part of capitalism. Perfect competition (read: efficient capitalism) is achieved without copyright and without differentiating using brands and patents.
Copyright is used to protect someones thoughts and brands. Patents were originally introduced because they were meant to encourage innovation - IMHO, due to the length that patents can now last, they are doing the opposite.
Uhm... I'm not sure how likely it is that the UK, France and Germany will reach that figure until the actual Euro-wide launch has taken place. There are considerbly less people in the UK, France and Germany than there are in the US.
Without doing any calculations, per capita I would say 800,000 seems about right - maybe a bit under.
Actually you're wrong. Any citizen of an EU state automatically has EU Citizenship. This was introduced as a legal concept in the Maastricht treaty (1992).
Slashdot Mirror
Since Slashdot chews up non-ASCII characters?? I think he meant '' which is U+0430!
If America was to stop all Chinese imports immediately - maybe even over a year - you would see hyperinflation. The price of some of the goods you take for granted would sky rocket. And this crap about China stealing all the jobs in America/Europe is bull. Most Americans or Europeans don't want to be doing the jobs that go East anyway.
Nobody uses the British billion - not even Britons. So yeah, the yankee billion.
I take offence at that comment :P It has be proven over and over again that the Black Country/Brummie accent is far superior to other accents on the British Isles.
A simplified version will generally not be received well - especially for Indic scripts. Although I'm not familiar with Bengali, in Gurmukhi there are no large rendering problems. I suppose you should check the status of Pango/ICU if you're using Gnome and see how well Bengali is supported. I know there was lots of discussion with problems with Bengali up to a few months ago on the Unicode Indic mailing list. Windows has only just got support in service pack 2!
Untrue. All South Indian languages use Unicode for encoding, and yet, none of their scripts are based on Devnaagri.
I was referring to the fact that all scripts are based on Devanagari in the way that they are processed. I'm not sure about South Indian scripts, but Gurmukhi has certain peculiarities (e.g. Halant, Addak Bindi) which are unused in the script. For example, Halant is never used in Gurmukhi - detecting when an inherent 'a' is dropped is up to the reader.
Now, I can't read Gurmukhi myself, so I'm not sure what you mean by independent vowels being unnatural. Are you saying that Gurmukhi doesn't use the vowels 'a', 'aa', 'i', 'ii' etc seperately?
To the contrary. It uses independent vowels as much as any Indic language. However they are constructed using three special vowel barer characters (Ura, Era and Iri). Depedent vowels are then attached to these characters to make independent vowels. They should have been encoded by using the base characters and allowing users to manually add a vowel - not by using precomposed characters.
That said, I still believe ISCII is the most optimal solution we have at hand for Indic language computing, and that, since the only real block now is on a uniform standard, it's best if the developer community not go back on internationally agreed standards.
I agree that of all the existing 'standards' ISCII was by far the best and most scientific in its approach to Indian scripts. However I still feel there were deficiencies and that ISCII compatibility should not have been a major requirement for Unicode - it just wasn't and isn't used enough.
I think the largest problem with India bridging the divide with Linux is (or was) poor language support. Thank fully these problems have been slowly addressed using Unicode.
However there are still issues outstanding. All the major Indian scripts encoded using Unicode are based on Devanagari (used to write Hindi and other languages). This has caused headaches for some scripts and has made other scripts unneccessarily complex. Take for example Gurmukhi (the script used to write Punjabi) - Gurmukhi is a simple script and doesn't have the complexities involved in some other Indic scripts. However to maintain compatibility with other scripts, independent vowels are encoded seperately which is unnatural for Gurmukhi. This causes problems with typing and adds and extra layer of complexity.
As the author of the Punjabi Computing Resource Centre I have actively been looking into such issues (others exist). However as I see it, we have been forced to accept a standard that hasn't been fully thought out for individual Indian scripts. It is a standard we can live with, but is not perfect. A lot can be blamed on ISCII!
Try this for size: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4129 579.stm.
"The United States has promised $15m in immediate aid and has said more will follow. The European Union has pledged $40.5m."
In addition, EU member states make their own contributions.
2G networks in the UK cover 99% of the population. This includes big sparse areas and motorways. The only real problems you get are when going underground or in tunnels. Other than that, coverage is pretty good on Vodafone, O2 and Orange. T-Mobile lacks a bit, but is still not bad.
3G phones can automatically fallback to 2G when there is no 3G reception. As such, you can use your phone pretty much everywhere. You can only use video calling and high-bandwidth apps in the 3G area though.
Also odd that both feature the Queen Of England but are not english currency.
Well, the "Queen of England" also happens to be the Queen of Australia and the Queen of Canada. She still remains the head of state of quite a few countries around the world.
Here in the UK, broadcasters generally don't censor brands on-screen. However, lots of programmes from the US have bits censored just about everywhere. For example, take some of the programmes on MTV like Jackass or The Osbournes. Initially I thought it was just to censor rude words or nudity... but it obviously wasn't. British MTV programmes don't have the same level of censorship.
It actually gets very annoying after a while. Especially when you're not used to it.
In English, try Three UK.
The full screen option has been there as long as I remember. Definately available on the free RealOne player and above.
Try getting your computer to play MPEG-4 Video at that sort of resolution. You'll need something close to a 2.8GHz PC with something a bit more powerful than a GeForce 2.
In the UK, ATMs that are part of the Link network are generally free to all participating banks. So, even though I'm a HSBC user, I can use HSBC, Natwest, Lloyds TSB, Halifax etc. ATMs for free. The only time you ever really need to pay to use ATMs is for the private ones in clubs and bars and for building societies.
When I was living in University accommodation, I had a 100mbit ethernet connection to the web. Of that, the maximum I ever uploaded on P2P was 6000KBytes/sec. The maximum I ever downloaded at (on P2P networks) was 500KBytes/sec. The maximum constant speed was 100KBytes/sec and even then, it wasn't that often.
I just don't know where all my upstream went... Damn leechers.
My memory of secondary school English lessons may be lacking - but erm, aren't trademarks generally nouns? Google is certainly a noun as are all brand names. :D
True, but the word is still incorrect.
I had this problem. I had to uninstall it, remove all the profile directories and re-install it. Works like a charm now though!
A patent is simply there to encourage innovation - which they do in the short term. However, because they last up to 20 years (which IMHO is too long), by the time the patents have run out, the device/technology is usually outdated. It works as a way to block competition (although this isn't ALWAYS the case).
I like how you put words into my mouth - where did I say there were too many patents?
And yes - it's DAMNED easy for billion dollar multi-nationals to get patents. Compare that to the average Joe who might have a really good worked out idea but can't afford the thousands of pounds required to patent it.
And back to the point - neither copyright nor patents are required in a truely market-driven capitalist economy. In fact, I'd say theoretically that they are detrimental to a market-drive economy.
Copyright is in no way an essential part of capitalism. Perfect competition (read: efficient capitalism) is achieved without copyright and without differentiating using brands and patents. Copyright is used to protect someones thoughts and brands. Patents were originally introduced because they were meant to encourage innovation - IMHO, due to the length that patents can now last, they are doing the opposite.
Uhm... I'm not sure how likely it is that the UK, France and Germany will reach that figure until the actual Euro-wide launch has taken place. There are considerbly less people in the UK, France and Germany than there are in the US. Without doing any calculations, per capita I would say 800,000 seems about right - maybe a bit under.
Actually you're wrong. Any citizen of an EU state automatically has EU Citizenship. This was introduced as a legal concept in the Maastricht treaty (1992).
In PPP figures the EU would be larger economically. It's just that the poster used the wrong figures (plain GDP).
European Union GDP $: 11.50 trillion Per Capita $: 25,300 Pop: 454,900,000
United States GDP $: 10.40 trillion Per Capita $: 37,600 Pop: 290,343,000
MPEG2 Movies are compressed. I think maybe you're getting confused (or maybe I'm confused?!).