What I haven't seen discussed is the effects of this decision on Google Apps users, in other words, (paying!) business users. With Google shuttering XMPP federation, you instantly lose the ability to communicate outside your organization (unless your customers/partners are also using google). As federated XMPP is much more heavily used in the business world, this drastically alters the value proposition of using Google Apps since you lose the very interoperability that used to be a selling point.

I'd love to see Google answer that particular question. All "enterprise IM" solutions out there are built on (federated!) XMPP. Even Microsoft's.

This isn't a theoretical question -- My last two employers used federated XMPP to communicate, both internally and with external clients/vendors.

Except the Battlefield Earth movie covered less than half of the book.

My parents are teachers (univerity-level ESL). My fiancee's mother and aunt are teachers. (elementary school)

The work doesn't end when the bell rings, and it is a rare day indeed when it doesn't come home. 60-hour weeks are common, but 50-ish is more typical.

First, Healty food isn't necessarily more expensive, but it takes time to prepare. Given how much one's diet influences one's health and overall well-being, I'm damn well going to eat healthily.

Meanwhile. My post wasn't intended to moan about my lot in life, but to illustrate how absolutely horrid teachers' salaries are discouraging extremely qualified folks from considering teaching as a viable career.

(and you seem to have misunderstood me, I chose to *not* accept barely part-time employment as a substitute teacher -- though the final straw was a couple of run-ins I had with the brain-dead breaucracy that is the true blight of public education..)

Argh. Make that $24K. $22K base salary plus $2K bonus for being in an in-demand field. (I can do math, really!)

I went so far as to get a provisional teaching certificate in my local high school district; my starting salary, full-time, even in a "high demand" STEM field, was $26K/year, less than half of what I was making as a software engineer at the time. (And I wouldn't be working full-time initially -- only way in the door is subbing, and hoping something opens up). To put that in perspective, my mortgage plus utilities (in central Florida) run me about $18K/yr, leaving $6K for taxes, food, transportation, clothing, oh, and classroom supplies that the district can't pay for either.

It's one thing to take a salary hit to do soemthing you love; but quite frankly I love a roof over my head and (healthy) food on my table even more.

SimpleDirectMedia Layer. (http://www.libsdl.org/)

With SDL, you can do 2D, 3D (via OpenGL), Sound, Input, and basic video overlay. It supports well over a dozen platforms, including consoles.

GPU-accelerated video decoding isn't supported/exported, but that's not part of DirectX.
SDL even has a Networking layer too, but it's not part of the core. (Actually DirectPlay is deprecated, and its replacement isn't part of DirectX either)