| Thoughts from London
In a conversation with my fellow columnist Thalif Deen, foreign secretary Palitha Kohona has made several observations on the foreign service some of which were not in the least flattering. Some have in communications to me already ridiculed several of these comments that were carried in this newspaper last Sunday. They have dismissed them as the ravings of a man trying to make an impression in a country that he left many years ago and is trying to belittle our diplomatic service because he has served for some years in the Australian foreign service, which itself leaves something to be desired in my own experience of it. I don’t share these views and I think there are bigger issues to consider here than what motivated Palitha Kohona to say what he did.
Before doing so, there is a more fundamental issue which I believe raises some concerns.
Who'd be a director?
Mike Figgis was disillusioned with Nicolas Cage, felt 'beaten up' by Richard Gere and thought James Gandolfini 'scary'. As for dating actresses... He tells all to Nigel Farndale A man distracted by his washing machine, that is Mike Figgis when I meet him in his north London flat on an overcast afternoon. He is sitting on a laundry bin in front of the machine, staring gloomily into its porthole, perhaps in the hope that it will feel sorry for him and start working again. Without much conviction he offers me a coffee and says he will be with me in a minute. .
Listening without prejudice
IN a room of about 30 people, a man at the dais is busy making swift gesticulations even as pointers on the screen behind him depict what his actions mean. Not a single word is spoken but the audience is listening in rapt attention. Thats the beauty of the Indian Sign Language (ISL) a language that has a strong potential to bring the worlds of the hearing impaired and those with hearing abilities, together. Having understood this very fact, it didnt take long for two city-based women- Anita Iyer, a home-maker and Poonam Kochhar, who runs a travel agencyto get working on the concept by conducting a unique workshop on the ISL. That was how the idea of Avanti was born barely three weeks ago. Avanti, in the Italian language means to come in or to move forward. Through this workshop, were trying to work for people with hearing disabilities to start with and want to do programmes for the visually disabled, too.
Netflix Q1 2007 Earnings Call Transcript
Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Netflix first quarter 2007 earnings conference call. Today's call is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to Deborah Crawford, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am. Deborah Crawford Thank you and good morning. Welcome to Netflix's first quarter 2007 earnings call. Before turning the call over the Reed Hastings, the company's co-founder and CEO, I'll dispense with the customary cautionary language and comment about the webcast for this earnings call. We released earnings for the first quarter at approximately 5 a.m. Pacific time. The earnings release, which includes a reconciliation of all non-GAAP financial measures to GAAP, and this conference call, are available at the company's investor relations website at www.netflix.com.
Ruby Conference: Ruby to Crown the JVM?
In case you haven't heard, JRuby is an all-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. And here at the Ruby-fest in San Jose Nick Sieger of the JRuby core team educates us on the current apple of his eye: JRuby: Ruby on the JVM. He starts by asking, "What can Java do for Ruby?" Java, Sun's darling of programming languages, is hardly scoff-worthy. To start with it's got Applets! Faces! a five-line "Hello, World!" program! and it's enterprisey! Woo hoo! But, can Sun — which hired the JRuby project leads last September — convince the world that Ruby atop a JVM is the right answer? .
Don't get all tongue-tied
"Riding the crest of globalization and technology," began a newspaper report last week, "English dominates the world as no language ever has." Amid the somewhat obscure, albeit fascinating, comparisons of English with Medieval Latin and mentions of Papuan pidgin, is the perhaps even more profound claim, in the words of the University of California's Mark Warschauer, that "English has become the second language of everybody." "There may be more native speakers of Chinese, Spanish or Hindi," the article points out, "but it is English they speak when they talk across cultures," or, more to the point, when they talk to each other. English claims 400 million speakers as a first language, 300-500 million as a fluent second language and perhaps 750 million who speak it as a foreign language.
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