I apologise. I am not properly trained to use these characters. I am still not sure what the rule is to use the spoken or unspoken character. I will refrain from using them temporarily until I am properly trained.
Also....Gutenberg was a big jerk! Not that this fact is recorded in history books. No respect for English letters. I note that the umlaut versions of the German vowels survived. That said The ë and ï forms don't seem to be used in modern German so I assume some eastern european languages or scandinavian languages must use them. As regards .Net and Java, I find this tricky. The .Net framework was able to benefit from looking at what worked well in Java and what didn't and make a number of clever innovations in .Net. There is a lot of discussion of things like modularisation or properties or events or runtime support for generics and many other things which have been available in .Net for some time which for Java are still quite some time away. Microsoft may be evil in many instances but they also for their sins have a lot of money and resources. I think it still remains to be seen if Java can catch up or even overtake .Net in terms of features even with Oracle and IBM working on it together. Sun with Java has made a lot of posturing about being open source but it has always retained some rights and control such that it is not totally open. I don't see that changing particularly with Oracle. In an idealistic world i.e. the one I wish I lived in, Open Source and Open Standards would run rings around the proprietary ones. Collaboration of multiple parties would result in better technologies than one companies proprietary solution. I am seeing more and more that the dictatorship with should not win in the ideal world ends up winning in practice. OpenGL 3 for example was a huge disappointment. OpenGL being an open standard driven by a group of members. Rather than moving things forward, due to a lot of squabbling and in fighting progress moved very slowly and agreements did not get made properly (I bet it was Autodesk's fault). Meanwhile Microsoft telling the Graphics cards vendors how high to jump and alone dictating what would be in DirectX it seems these days DirectX is the trend setter and has overtaken OpenGL (in spite of OpenGL having a head start and being better to begin with). What went wrong? The answer is relevant to Java. In the Java world we have the JCP which by the sounds of it is bogged down with political in-fighting. Microsoft controls .Net without having to particularly negotiate with anyone. Java had a head start and to begin with had many parts of the stack which were cleaner and more sophisticated. As time has gone on it feels like .Net has kept gaining ground until in many ways it becomes the trend setter with Java copying what .Net has had for a while. Is this idea that open standards and open communities really all it is hyped up to be in practice given these two examples where the proprietary standards seems to be winning out? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javapo...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
