This is all about the EU blocking Oracle's acquisition of Sun. They are trolling for testimonials about how the Sun acquisition would force people to buy Oracle DB, which is almost certainly would not:

http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/ibu_index.php?storyid=832

Look at Berkeley DB (on which OpenLDAP uttely depends.) It's now "Oracle Berkeley DB". I don't see any monkey business with that arrangement (although the OpenLDAP people are probably working on ditching BDB just as due diligence.)

Contingency? We don't have no contingency. Seriously though: looks like the only options are to either hope someone else's similar but not quite equivalent satellite generates data they can use; or, spend the money to build and launch a replacement. By the way, they spent 7 years building, testing and waiting for launch, not 2.

Well yes they do do things differently, but KVM does it better and simpler by just running on Linux as the base system hypervisor. From a maintenance point of view things get far simpler, as the OP said.

That statement is just, well, daft. You're implying that Xen can't run VMs under Linux but KVM can, or Xen can run VMs on systems other than Linux or something that KVM can't do? They're both Linux only at this point, and Xen effectively runs a forked version of Linux because it isn't, and won't be, upstream.

Xen and KVM are completely different types of virtualization solution. The supposed rivalry between the two is largely bad journalism, not rooted in anything to do with the platforms themselves. If you want to run a single physical computer with multiple operating system instances, such as replacing a bank of servers with a single machine, Xen is your guy. If you want to run VMs under Linux, KVM is your friend. Conflating the two is like comparing... well, to use a car analogy, for this is Slashdot, a railroad with a tractor trailer.

I have had my identity stolen twice and both time it was a data breach with a merchant I was dealing with. I find it appalling that it is so easy to get a credit or signup for a loan. How about more responsibility on the bank merchant part? The there credit bureaus should be held responsible for this mess. They are making profit using our data and we end up paying to clean it up or monitor it.

Plain and simple, the only thing that's going to really make a dent in identity theft is to make identities harder to steal, and that means requiring all the banks and credit card companies to jump through more identity verification hoops before they give someone your money or a line of credit in your name.

Sure, requiring you to go to a licensed notary and have a credit card application notarized might not make it so easy to get credit, but it would also make it harder to get credit in your name.

The banks and credit card companies could do this, but it's more profitable to let people steal your identity and then just jack up fees and interest rates to cover the losses.

This back and forth about piracy and morality and P2P is such bullshit.

Everyone -- yes, every goddamn one -- knows that the Hollywood/MPAA (and the RIAA music fight) boils down to one thing: money in the pockets of executives. That's it. It's only about technology insofar how that technology impacts the bottom-line. It's not about art. It's about making sure a select group of executives make sure they can keep the mortgage payments on their Bel-Air mansions and can keep memberships in their country clubs. That's it. That's where my, yours, and everyone else's dollars are going: to buy some titanium fucking Big Bertha golf club for the peabrained asshole who's been crowned king of the other peabrained assholes working beneath him.

Valenti wants to make sure the cash keeps flowing into his pocket and into the pocket of every other overpaid, dim-bulb, "I can green-light this" executive motherfucker working the valley.

You want goddamn immorality? It's the entertainment industry and the people that run it that are at the very foundations of the "immorality" of piracy. Forget Janet Jackson's nipple. Forget Powell's sudden decision to attempt to regulate *cable* television today (!). Forget the fact (and I'll digress here) that the fundamentalist assholes that have gone to see Mel Gibson's "Passion" claim that it's a fantastic movie yet in the same breath decry Janet Jackson's nipple, the state of marriage, and the violence in contemporary culture -- overlooking perhaps that the Passion is more "violent" than any number of Grand Theft Auto games strung together and more "explicit" than any svelt little nipple hiding behind a sun-shaped nipple medallion. The hypocrisy of Valenti and his immoral executive motherfuckers is astounding. It boggles the mind.

For a while I have been arguing that the debate should not be framed in the "innovator versus freeloader" view but in a "constitutional rights and individual property rights versus expansive intellectual property" view. Most Americans do not accept the idea that you have a right to give away a copy of a song to anyone who wants it. While we hear constantly about those numbers that "40% of internet users said they saw nothing wrong with pirating music" we cannot go by that. Americans are just like any other people; when we think we can get away with something that doesn't seem to directly hurt someone we do it. Downloading bootlegs doesn't seem to hurt anyone, but it can. If I had bootlegged the entire new Android Lust album instead of buying it on iTunes I would have not sent the chick behind AL any money. iTunes allowed me to send her maybe $2 for the album which I paid $10, probably a good $5 less than what I would have paid for a CD copy. We need to stress to the government that iTunes, not more legislation, is the key to getting the system working. We need to show them that bands like Metallica refuse to do their part because they want an all or nothing. Buy 20-30 songs on iTunes and you give Apple more ammo to counter the claims that piracy has no solution. They can just shrug in front of Congress and say "it's not our side, the legal downloading side, that has dropped the ball. They refuse to let people buy their tracks one by one because they want them to buy them all or nothing." There will always be politicians who will rail against piracy and ignore iTunes and other legal services, but many politicians will just look at these industries and say "the mechanisms are in place, why aren't you being a team player, why are you coming to us for help when there are companies dying to make the market work for you?" Politicans tend to be lazy, just look at how many Senate votes that John Kerry has missed in the past 12 years. Something like 1000 or more a year according to Fox News. We can appeal to the public by pointing out the supremacy of the 1st amendment over Article I, Section 8, Clause 3. The first amendment was ratified later so it supercedes everything in the original constitution, just as all parts of the constitution must be read in the context of the Bill of Rights. We should also point out how anti-backup provisions and attitudes like Jack Valenti's "if you want a backup, buy another copy" are against common sense, American tradition and capitalist principles. I have yet to read of a prominent capitalist theorist who would support the DMCA. Rand, Ricardo, Hayek and Smith are probably spinning in their graves over the DMCA and similar "seller protection legislation." The hollywood position is built on pure, unprincipled greed. Defeating it only means that we need to be consistant and show the public where the law is going to start biting them in the ass if they don't care now.

I think that a lot of this "piracy" business that the MPAA and RIAA is a load of crap. For example, one of the loudest voices against Napster (before the became "legit") was Metallica. In one of the tape inserts for one of their albums (I forget which one), they claim outright that they used to trade tapes back and forth and copy them all the time before they made it big. So, it is OK when they commited piracy, but it isn't now when they are a target of it? I'm glad their last album sucked....

The combination of crappy layouts, shoddy design, counter-intuitive interface, and juvenile audience are all working together to render Myspace irrelevant. I just checked my myspace page, apparently for the first time since May of this year. Nothing's changed...

There is geological evidence that the Mediterranean and Black Seas were once cut off from the rest of the worlds oceans in (relatively recent) times. Its possible that the Arctic ocean was also cut off during the ice age, but then it was more an ice shelf than an ocean/sea.Anyway in a million years we may have managed to melt all the (land supported) ice and most of africa would be underwater before the rift opens wide. On the other hand if we cause enough of a greenhouse effect, all the water could be boiled off, and the planet resembles venus.

My opinion was always if the taxpayers pay for it, the taxpayers own it. Research, patents and discoveries and even software. At a minimum the government should be able to transfer licenses from one branch to another. If your research is that valuable, don't take federal money. A lot of universities are taking federal money for research and then selling those discoveries to companies that sell them back to the taxpayers. It's not always that clean but it just doesn't seem right. If you don't like the restrictions, don't sell to the government. I love the way so many institutions, lately including banks, are acting like they're doing us a favor taking federal money. And there's always someone who will yap about government wouldn't be able to get access the best software tools. I doubt that. I'm not talking about making anything the government buys open source, just that government can move software licenses around based on need.

I am having a Franz Kafka problem with Google. My wife (the worlds worst technophobe) lost the password to her blog. Today I discovered that the alternate email address for the account is not only an deliverable address it's an invalid domain altogether. Google does not have a provision to fix this. The reset password either goes to the address for which I need the password, or, it goes to an undeliverable address. And every 'form' they have for every single problem on Blogger goes to the same submission form. But here's the good part. To protect my privacy - Google's official response is to say in effect "We don't believe you, we think you're lying and so we won't and can't help you." And there appears to be no recourse. No place to send an email no place to explain even in one sentence what this problem is. So fuck Google and the Chinese Death Squads that use them. Fuck them all.

I find it amazing that nobody seems to notice that adding an ECHELON and a DCS1000 feed to Google is making it like the NSA, but where people actually VOLUNTEER data. In addition, it's Terms of Service give it more legal freedom to use and abuse your information and intellectual property than even the US border control can with accessing laptops of people entering the country. It appears 8+ years of indoctrination is paying off big time - nobody appears to remember that privacy is a basic right. All it takes is some BS about "not being evil" for people to miss the shocking depth to which they can access all your personal data. Even the stuff they don't hold themselves will come up through the search engine. By matching up DNS records they will be able to add your entire Internet activity to your identity. That's going to be fun when you catch some sort of virus downloading porn - and the next time you apply for a job..

...had wonky drivers. Especially on their more recent cards (radeon forward). I'm guessing they get their cards so cheap by not paying their driver team. For instance, on my mulitmonitor system I used to have the Radeon VE (Win2k). I installed Wolfenstein and Jedi Knight. Wolfenstein would crash all the time, but Jedi Knight was okay. So I upgraded drivers. Then Jedi Knight didn't work, and Wolfenstein did. Bah. Not to mention going from TV out to Monitor out and back again was a terrifying ordeal because their saveable settings "themes" don't work. Or at least didn't work up until the time I took out my *last* ATI card. mmmmmm Parhelia....