I've got a related question that doesn't rate "Ask Slashdot" status, so I'll ask it here...
I use IMAP to read my mail, mostly because that makes it easy to read from both work and home, and occasionally when I'm on the road. Right now I'm using the bayesian filter in Mozilla. It's great, but since it's client-based that means I have three seperate filters I need to train. Sometimes I'll run into weird problems where two of the filters think an email is good but the third thinks its spam. If I accidentally left the third one running at home when I went to work, it will sometimes decide to re-classify my inbox and make messages "magically" pop in to the junk mail folder behind my back. Not good.
What I'd love is a filter that I could run on my server box at home and point at the IMAP mailboxes at my ISP. I'd want it to filter the messages and move the spam to the Junk IMAP folder rather than a local one. That way all of my mail clients would be seeing the same thing and using the same training data. I'm not sure what the UI to this would be -- there would need to be some way to train the filter in both bulk (this folder is all spam) and individual (this one message is spam) modes.
I've done a bit of looking for a tool like this, but I haven't found anything that looks ideal yet. Some of the filters mention that they support IMAP, but it's unclear whether they're optimized for a multiple-client setup like this. For example, the IMAP-aware Outlook plugins (in SpamBayes?) wouldn't do the trick.
Does anyone know if such a thing exists? I'd prefer one that ran on Windows, since that's what my server runs right now. (I know, I know. But it was very easy to set up, and I'd rather spend time improving my programming skills instead of leaning to be a Linux admin. I was a 4.3BSD admin way back in the day, but it's been a while.) If there were a great solution that only ran on Linux, that might motivate me to switch, though.
>The important thing to note here is... SCO would win this one because Linus *did* say that.
To win a libel or slander suit, I think you have to prove that the statement was a) injurious to your reputation, b) untrue, and c) known to be untrue. SCO might be able to prove a), but I think they'd have a few problems with b) and c).
IANAL and all that.
Re:Map of UPS battery exhaustions
on
Network Blackout
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· Score: 4, Insightful
At a company I used to work for the network operations folks were supposedly bragging about how redundant the servers were, with backup power, automatic network failover, and so on. So an executive decided to test them on it: he grabbed a power cord from one of the switches and pulled it out of the wall. Oops. It turned out that one wasn't redundant. Or rather, it technically was -- there were two of them -- but the failover mechanism didn't work.
At my last job we had similar problems. The system was heavily dependent on JMS, so there were rundandant JMS servers. Unfortunately, the first time the primary one on the production network went down under load all the client systems had to send tons of JMS messages around as part of the recovery process, which created a snowball effect that took down the secondary server and many of the other clients too. And then of course the clients started coming back up and sending out JMS messages to announce the fact.... (It turned out to be a bug in the JMS client that eventually got fixed, but it wasn't pretty while it was happening.)
Moral: if you haven't tested the redundancy / failover / power failure mechanism, it might as well not exist.
Me too, actually. I'd probably try to do the same thing if I had the money to throw around. (And if I were in good enough shape physically.) I just wish he'd gotten the money a better way than from being in a bad boy band, like maybe robbing banks or something.
>In the cases where "most people see two colors and I only see one", what colour do you see? Red or Green? Or neither?
Usually it's more like gray, or at least what I think is gray. Most of the colors I have trouble with are unsaturated pinks, greens, and cyans. If I look at one of them in isolation or on a gray background, it often looks grey to me. But if one of these colors is right next to a more-saturated version of itself, I can usually tell that they're different. I also sometimes think purple is blue unless it's what other people would consider a fairly reddish purple. Again, if you put purple and blue right next to each other I can see the difference.
I had a grandfather who was so colorblind that he couldn't distinguish red and green traffic lights except by knowing that the red one was always on top. He had a story about getting a ticket for running a red light in a small town where the lights were mounted sideways. I'm not sure whether that was true or just the sort of tall tale that grandfathers like to tell. I can definitely distinguish red and green lights myself. The red ones look very red, but the green ones often don't look all that green. The new LED lights are more obvious.
Of course, I'm used to all of this, so I often correct for it unconsciously. That means I can sometimes be wrong in the opposite direction -- I'll see something that's gray but decide that means it must be one of the greens that just looks gray. A guy I knew in college who was also color-blind used the phrase "so gray it must be green," which is perfect. The subject came up because we were lab partners in inorganic chemistry and were having just a little trouble with the titration experiments.
Referring to the "one backup copy" nonsense, the article says:
This argument is frivolous, by which I mean that it would be a violation of professional obligation for Mr Heise or any other lawyer to submit it to a court.
I love it when the lawyers start insulting each other.:-)
Many photographers seem to think that the 6 megapixel digital SLRs are pretty close to 35mm quality in good light and better in poor light or when you have to use a high speed film for other reasons. See this comparison for example.
The 11 megapixel Canon 1Ds seem to be much better than 35mm and almost as good as medium-format; here's a review. I don't think Nikon has an equivalent camera out yet, but I have all Canon gear (a D60 at the moment) so I haven't been paying much attention.
I suppose trying to describe it to us with only three colors would be much like trying to describe any kind of color to somebody completely color blind
Or trying to describe color-blindness to someone with normal color vision. Whenever I tell someone I'm color-blind (a mild form of red/green color-blindness) they always ask, "So what does red look like to you?" I don't know; it just looks red. I was taught to call that color "red", so red it is. I don't really have any way of knowing whether it's the same red that everyone else sees. However, there are definitely some cases where most people see two colors and I only see one
When I was in kindergarden, my teacher thought I was stupid because I had a hard time learning colors.:-)
By "mutual defense clause" I think he means things like section 7 of the Common Public License that's used by Eclipse. It basically says that if someone contributes code to a CPL'd project they're granting a license to any patents they have that cover that code. If you sue a contributor over any software patent, your license to use those patents suddenly goes away.
The potential problem with this is that if you are shipping something based on a CPL'd project -- say an IDE built on Eclipse -- and a contributor to the project starts blatantly infringing on one of your patents, you can't sue them without having your license to any of their patents used in the project revoked. Of course, if you've contributed your own code to the project and have patents to cover it, then the first contributor can't sue you for infringing on their patent whose license was automatically revoked. If they did, their license to use your patent would be revoked too. At that point, I think the whole project would reach some sort of event horizon, consume all lawyers in the vicinity, and disappear into a black hole.
It's quite public-spirited of IBM to put something like this in the CPL -- they're trying to keep people from using software patents. (The IBM lawyers I talked to when I worked there said that's why they put this clause in, and I have no reason to doubt them.) But some people see this as hypocritical given how many software patents IBM files every year. An open-source project I organized when I was at IBM eventually had to switch to a different license to keep from scaring away potential users.
Sort of. My last job was at a company that does voice applications. The telephony software supported playback of 8kHz audio files (that's all the bandwidth you get on a normal phone), so we had to downsample the original recordings to 8 kHz. We found that there was a minor but (barely) audible improvement in the sound quality if we did the original recordings at 48 kHz rather than at 44.1 kHz, because that way the downsampling is really sampling, not interpolation.
I haven't tried downsampling from 48 kHz to 44.1 kHz, but I suspect you'd hear the same thing: a minor but noticeable degradation.
>'m sure many people here have done voluntary tech support for friends and family. What do you find to be the most frequent problems?
Complete lack of clues? Seriously, non-geeks often seem to totally miss things that seem obvious to anyone with a little bit of computer experience. I think part of it is that they often have have no "mental model" of what's going on. (Yes, I did work for an education researcher for a while.) Many users have a totally rote approach to using the computer. They know what keys to press and what buttons to click, but they don't know why.
My favorite example of a user not seeing what was right in front of her was when a 70-year-old neighbor called me and said that the letter she was editing in Word had "disappeared". I asked her what was on the screen, and she said "nothing". So of course I asked "What do you mean, 'nothing'? Is there a little blinking thing where you're supposed to type?" No. "Are there any windows on the screen?" No. "Are there any menus?" No. Well, this I had to see. I walked down to her house and looked. The screen had a maximized Word window, complete with menu bar, blinking text cursor, and mouse cursor. I just told her "Yeah, word deletes stuff when you press the backspace key. That sucks, doesn't it?"
My other favorite example is from my last job. Our group wrote development tools, and since there wasn't a separate tech support group we did it ourselves. One person wrote in and wanted to know how to "check" a program. She included a screenshot of the syntax checking tool. Right down at the bottom of the window was a "Check" button. That email went on my "Moron of the week" wall. (To be fair, direct input from the developers using our tools was usually valuable. I just wish we had a cluelessness filter to go with the spam filter.)
>Perhaps it's some other factor, such as the "dumbing-down" of computers by the media leading to common misconceptions?
For some people, the dumber the better. It annoys me, but I try to remember that they're just using it as a tool to get something done. Then I remember that I know how to use and clean and adjust my own @#$% tools.:-)
Something is seriously wrong in the world on a day when K5 is faster than Slashdot.
This is totally off-topic, but what the hell; it's definitely more interesting than SCO's latest blather.
>the class (contract) lower down in the hierarchy (chronology); i.e., the more immediate parent node, takes precedence.
In the OOP languages that I'm familiar with, that's exactly what happens. It could be argued that this is the whole point of OOP, or at least a major one. The interesting case is when a language supports true multiple inheritance and a subclass directly inherits from two classes that have the same functions. (I mean that both classes are "parents", rather than one parent and one grandparent.) My C++ is rusty, but if I remember right it handles this case by saying that the parent class that was listed first in the declaration wins. Java (and C# I think) solves this by disallowing multiple inheritance.
For contracts, my understanding is that if a later contract between two parties explicitly contradicts an earlier contract, the later one wins. By explicitly, I mean that the later contract says that it's amending the earlier one, e.g. "This provision replaces section 3, paragraph 7 of the contract between X and Y dated Sept 2, 1997, hereinunder(1) attached as amendment A," or equivalent legalese. On the other hand, if the contracts are just plain contradictory (or can be interpreted that way), then the later one will usually win, but only after the lawyers and judges argue about it for a long time.
No, IANAL, but I've had to work with them a bit.
(1) I think that's the first time I've ever used the word hereinunder. Someone save me before it's too late!
>I'm not much at reading patents but this looks like the usual silly IT patent
Even though I dislike software patents in general and think they should be abolished or have a much shorter duration, I've got to admire whoever wrote this one. They did a very good job making the claims broad enough to cover a lot of cases but narrow enough to stand up. I've had to analyze a few patents in the past, and it's often possible to find ways around them. For example, you can find a special case that the claims don't cover and then make sure your software fits that special case. That looks pretty hard to do with this patent.
>**--BUT--**, they had ALL the Linux boxes in the section displayed as "UTILITIES"....
>I would wager that they did this under the direction of an M$ memo...
Never ascribe to conspiracy that which can be explained by plain old ignorance, which is plentiful at Fry's.
Last time I looked through their music section, I found the Pink Floyd CD's filed under F.
>So I think Fry's has created a problem with its liberal return policy
Absolutely. It's bad enough that some hardware vendors (inluding Plextor and LiteOn, IIRC) won't sell their products through Fry's anymore. They were just getting too many returns from clueless Fry's customers and weren't making money through that channel.
> Indeed. Went there once (in LA) and was underwhelmed
The only big-ticket items I usually buy there are disk drives. When Fry's has them on sale, the prices are usually pretty good. The only reason I buy anything else from them is convenience; the store is a mile from my house and on the way home from work.
>Plus, I hate stores that make you "clear customs" before you can leave
Just walk on past them and out the door. It can be hard to do in the smaller Fry's stores where the sheep are all lined up waiting to be allowed to exit, but it's easy in the larger ones. Even in the smallish ones I can usually "excuse me" myself past the line and the inspectors. They've never hassled me when I've done this, though I sometimes get a dirty look. But even some of the folks doing this job at my local Fry's (Sunnyvale) seem to realize just how stupid it is.
On a side note, I actually encountered a helpful Fry's employee last week. He climbed up and down ladders and dug through several pallets of disk drives to find two unopened boxes with the drive I wanted. Then he even opened the boxes and check to make sure the antistatic bags were still sealed. I was astonished.
> glycol n 1: a sweet but poisonous syrupy liquid used as an antifreeze
Not all glycols are poisonous, and some are even used in medical products. People having abdominal surgery or other procedures are sometimes required to clean out the plumbing first (a "bowel preparation" in the jargon) by drinking a gallon or so of polyethylene glycol the night before. They even have great flavors like cherry. You might even be able to use the stuff to make smoke rings.
"I look at some businesses that do hard drive recovery - the prices are exhorbitant! I could buy 2 replacement drives for those prices."
Um, he did buy two replacement drives in the process of fixing the dead one. (He said he was going to try to return one of them.) The DIY approach was probably a lot faster, though.
That's what Lou Gerstner (the last CEO) had when he came to visit us a few years ago. Actually, it was two black Lincoln Town Cars. Gotta have room for those minions, you know!
Hercules is an open source software implementation of the mainframe System/370 and ESA/390 architectures
So, let me see if I have this right. I can run Hercules on my Linux box (or Win98, even) and emulate an S/390. And then I can get the IBM software that lets you run multiple, independent Linux VMs on S/390. My Linux box has now multiplied! Heck, I could even make it into a recursive Beowulf cluster.
> aren't there real human languages that aren't in unicode yet?
Yes, although they're adding more and more of them in recent versions. Tagalog is there now. The prominent remaining ones (or at least the only ones I'd heard of) are Balinese and Javanese.
The usual answer to the "What about the real languages?" question is "Well, if a human language needs to be encoded, someone who knows it well should write up a formal proposal for it." It's kind of a catch-22, because most of the unencoded human languages are seldom-used minority scripts that don't have many computer-literate speakers. And most of the Unicode geeks either don't know enough about them or aren't interested enough. Or are busy writing proposals like this.:-)
In my former life as a Unicode geek I always wanted to write up a proposal for the "Character formerly known as Prince", but never quite got around to it....
Slashdot Mirror
I use IMAP to read my mail, mostly because that makes it easy to read from both work and home, and occasionally when I'm on the road. Right now I'm using the bayesian filter in Mozilla. It's great, but since it's client-based that means I have three seperate filters I need to train. Sometimes I'll run into weird problems where two of the filters think an email is good but the third thinks its spam. If I accidentally left the third one running at home when I went to work, it will sometimes decide to re-classify my inbox and make messages "magically" pop in to the junk mail folder behind my back. Not good.
What I'd love is a filter that I could run on my server box at home and point at the IMAP mailboxes at my ISP. I'd want it to filter the messages and move the spam to the Junk IMAP folder rather than a local one. That way all of my mail clients would be seeing the same thing and using the same training data. I'm not sure what the UI to this would be -- there would need to be some way to train the filter in both bulk (this folder is all spam) and individual (this one message is spam) modes.
I've done a bit of looking for a tool like this, but I haven't found anything that looks ideal yet. Some of the filters mention that they support IMAP, but it's unclear whether they're optimized for a multiple-client setup like this. For example, the IMAP-aware Outlook plugins (in SpamBayes?) wouldn't do the trick.
Does anyone know if such a thing exists? I'd prefer one that ran on Windows, since that's what my server runs right now. (I know, I know. But it was very easy to set up, and I'd rather spend time improving my programming skills instead of leaning to be a Linux admin. I was a 4.3BSD admin way back in the day, but it's been a while.) If there were a great solution that only ran on Linux, that might motivate me to switch, though.
Any advice?
To win a libel or slander suit, I think you have to prove that the statement was a) injurious to your reputation, b) untrue, and c) known to be untrue. SCO might be able to prove a), but I think they'd have a few problems with b) and c).
IANAL and all that.
At my last job we had similar problems. The system was heavily dependent on JMS, so there were rundandant JMS servers. Unfortunately, the first time the primary one on the production network went down under load all the client systems had to send tons of JMS messages around as part of the recovery process, which created a snowball effect that took down the secondary server and many of the other clients too. And then of course the clients started coming back up and sending out JMS messages to announce the fact.... (It turned out to be a bug in the JMS client that eventually got fixed, but it wasn't pretty while it was happening.)
Moral: if you haven't tested the redundancy / failover / power failure mechanism, it might as well not exist.
Me too, actually. I'd probably try to do the same thing if I had the money to throw around. (And if I were in good enough shape physically.) I just wish he'd gotten the money a better way than from being in a bad boy band, like maybe robbing banks or something.
You mean like the International Space Station? :-)
Hey, what's wrong with sending Lance Bass into space?
Wait. They're not going to bring him back, are they?
>In the cases where "most people see two colors and I only see one", what colour do you see? Red or Green? Or neither?
Usually it's more like gray, or at least what I think is gray. Most of the colors I have trouble with are unsaturated pinks, greens, and cyans. If I look at one of them in isolation or on a gray background, it often looks grey to me. But if one of these colors is right next to a more-saturated version of itself, I can usually tell that they're different. I also sometimes think purple is blue unless it's what other people would consider a fairly reddish purple. Again, if you put purple and blue right next to each other I can see the difference.
I had a grandfather who was so colorblind that he couldn't distinguish red and green traffic lights except by knowing that the red one was always on top. He had a story about getting a ticket for running a red light in a small town where the lights were mounted sideways. I'm not sure whether that was true or just the sort of tall tale that grandfathers like to tell. I can definitely distinguish red and green lights myself. The red ones look very red, but the green ones often don't look all that green. The new LED lights are more obvious.
Of course, I'm used to all of this, so I often correct for it unconsciously. That means I can sometimes be wrong in the opposite direction -- I'll see something that's gray but decide that means it must be one of the greens that just looks gray. A guy I knew in college who was also color-blind used the phrase "so gray it must be green," which is perfect. The subject came up because we were lab partners in inorganic chemistry and were having just a little trouble with the titration experiments.
The 11 megapixel Canon 1Ds seem to be much better than 35mm and almost as good as medium-format; here's a review. I don't think Nikon has an equivalent camera out yet, but I have all Canon gear (a D60 at the moment) so I haven't been paying much attention.
Or trying to describe color-blindness to someone with normal color vision. Whenever I tell someone I'm color-blind (a mild form of red/green color-blindness) they always ask, "So what does red look like to you?" I don't know; it just looks red. I was taught to call that color "red", so red it is. I don't really have any way of knowing whether it's the same red that everyone else sees. However, there are definitely some cases where most people see two colors and I only see one
When I was in kindergarden, my teacher thought I was stupid because I had a hard time learning colors. :-)
It looks fine to me.
Did I mention that I'm color blind?
The potential problem with this is that if you are shipping something based on a CPL'd project -- say an IDE built on Eclipse -- and a contributor to the project starts blatantly infringing on one of your patents, you can't sue them without having your license to any of their patents used in the project revoked. Of course, if you've contributed your own code to the project and have patents to cover it, then the first contributor can't sue you for infringing on their patent whose license was automatically revoked. If they did, their license to use your patent would be revoked too. At that point, I think the whole project would reach some sort of event horizon, consume all lawyers in the vicinity, and disappear into a black hole.
It's quite public-spirited of IBM to put something like this in the CPL -- they're trying to keep people from using software patents. (The IBM lawyers I talked to when I worked there said that's why they put this clause in, and I have no reason to doubt them.) But some people see this as hypocritical given how many software patents IBM files every year. An open-source project I organized when I was at IBM eventually had to switch to a different license to keep from scaring away potential users.
Sort of. My last job was at a company that does voice applications. The telephony software supported playback of 8kHz audio files (that's all the bandwidth you get on a normal phone), so we had to downsample the original recordings to 8 kHz. We found that there was a minor but (barely) audible improvement in the sound quality if we did the original recordings at 48 kHz rather than at 44.1 kHz, because that way the downsampling is really sampling, not interpolation.
I haven't tried downsampling from 48 kHz to 44.1 kHz, but I suspect you'd hear the same thing: a minor but noticeable degradation.
Complete lack of clues? Seriously, non-geeks often seem to totally miss things that seem obvious to anyone with a little bit of computer experience. I think part of it is that they often have have no "mental model" of what's going on. (Yes, I did work for an education researcher for a while.) Many users have a totally rote approach to using the computer. They know what keys to press and what buttons to click, but they don't know why.
My favorite example of a user not seeing what was right in front of her was when a 70-year-old neighbor called me and said that the letter she was editing in Word had "disappeared". I asked her what was on the screen, and she said "nothing". So of course I asked "What do you mean, 'nothing'? Is there a little blinking thing where you're supposed to type?" No. "Are there any windows on the screen?" No. "Are there any menus?" No. Well, this I had to see. I walked down to her house and looked. The screen had a maximized Word window, complete with menu bar, blinking text cursor, and mouse cursor. I just told her "Yeah, word deletes stuff when you press the backspace key. That sucks, doesn't it?"
My other favorite example is from my last job. Our group wrote development tools, and since there wasn't a separate tech support group we did it ourselves. One person wrote in and wanted to know how to "check" a program. She included a screenshot of the syntax checking tool. Right down at the bottom of the window was a "Check" button. That email went on my "Moron of the week" wall. (To be fair, direct input from the developers using our tools was usually valuable. I just wish we had a cluelessness filter to go with the spam filter.)
>Perhaps it's some other factor, such as the "dumbing-down" of computers by the media leading to common misconceptions?
For some people, the dumber the better. It annoys me, but I try to remember that they're just using it as a tool to get something done. Then I remember that I know how to use and clean and adjust my own @#$% tools. :-)
Something is seriously wrong in the world on a day when K5 is faster than Slashdot.
>the class (contract) lower down in the hierarchy (chronology); i.e., the more immediate parent node, takes precedence.
In the OOP languages that I'm familiar with, that's exactly what happens. It could be argued that this is the whole point of OOP, or at least a major one. The interesting case is when a language supports true multiple inheritance and a subclass directly inherits from two classes that have the same functions. (I mean that both classes are "parents", rather than one parent and one grandparent.) My C++ is rusty, but if I remember right it handles this case by saying that the parent class that was listed first in the declaration wins. Java (and C# I think) solves this by disallowing multiple inheritance.
For contracts, my understanding is that if a later contract between two parties explicitly contradicts an earlier contract, the later one wins. By explicitly, I mean that the later contract says that it's amending the earlier one, e.g. "This provision replaces section 3, paragraph 7 of the contract between X and Y dated Sept 2, 1997, hereinunder(1) attached as amendment A," or equivalent legalese. On the other hand, if the contracts are just plain contradictory (or can be interpreted that way), then the later one will usually win, but only after the lawyers and judges argue about it for a long time.
No, IANAL, but I've had to work with them a bit.
(1) I think that's the first time I've ever used the word hereinunder. Someone save me before it's too late!
Even though I dislike software patents in general and think they should be abolished or have a much shorter duration, I've got to admire whoever wrote this one. They did a very good job making the claims broad enough to cover a lot of cases but narrow enough to stand up. I've had to analyze a few patents in the past, and it's often possible to find ways around them. For example, you can find a special case that the claims don't cover and then make sure your software fits that special case. That looks pretty hard to do with this patent.
No. They're a Fortune 500,000,000 company. Does that count?
>I would wager that they did this under the direction of an M$ memo...
Never ascribe to conspiracy that which can be explained by plain old ignorance, which is plentiful at Fry's.
Last time I looked through their music section, I found the Pink Floyd CD's filed under F.
Absolutely. It's bad enough that some hardware vendors (inluding Plextor and LiteOn, IIRC) won't sell their products through Fry's anymore. They were just getting too many returns from clueless Fry's customers and weren't making money through that channel.
The only big-ticket items I usually buy there are disk drives. When Fry's has them on sale, the prices are usually pretty good. The only reason I buy anything else from them is convenience; the store is a mile from my house and on the way home from work.
>Plus, I hate stores that make you "clear customs" before you can leave
Just walk on past them and out the door. It can be hard to do in the smaller Fry's stores where the sheep are all lined up waiting to be allowed to exit, but it's easy in the larger ones. Even in the smallish ones I can usually "excuse me" myself past the line and the inspectors. They've never hassled me when I've done this, though I sometimes get a dirty look. But even some of the folks doing this job at my local Fry's (Sunnyvale) seem to realize just how stupid it is.
On a side note, I actually encountered a helpful Fry's employee last week. He climbed up and down ladders and dug through several pallets of disk drives to find two unopened boxes with the drive I wanted. Then he even opened the boxes and check to make sure the antistatic bags were still sealed. I was astonished.
Not all glycols are poisonous, and some are even used in medical products. People having abdominal surgery or other procedures are sometimes required to clean out the plumbing first (a "bowel preparation" in the jargon) by drinking a gallon or so of polyethylene glycol the night before. They even have great flavors like cherry. You might even be able to use the stuff to make smoke rings.
And I'm not saying how I know that.
Um, he did buy two replacement drives in the process of fixing the dead one. (He said he was going to try to return one of them.) The DIY approach was probably a lot faster, though.
A black Lincoln Town Car. This is IBM, after all.
That's what Lou Gerstner (the last CEO) had when he came to visit us a few years ago. Actually, it was two black Lincoln Town Cars. Gotta have room for those minions, you know!
So, let me see if I have this right. I can run Hercules on my Linux box (or Win98, even) and emulate an S/390. And then I can get the IBM software that lets you run multiple, independent Linux VMs on S/390. My Linux box has now multiplied! Heck, I could even make it into a recursive Beowulf cluster.
That's step 1. Now to figure out step 2....
Yes, although they're adding more and more of them in recent versions. Tagalog is there now. The prominent remaining ones (or at least the only ones I'd heard of) are Balinese and Javanese.
The usual answer to the "What about the real languages?" question is "Well, if a human language needs to be encoded, someone who knows it well should write up a formal proposal for it." It's kind of a catch-22, because most of the unencoded human languages are seldom-used minority scripts that don't have many computer-literate speakers. And most of the Unicode geeks either don't know enough about them or aren't interested enough. Or are busy writing proposals like this. :-)
In my former life as a Unicode geek I always wanted to write up a proposal for the "Character formerly known as Prince", but never quite got around to it....