Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Sun Microsystems

Oracle Top Execs Answer Sun Employee Questions 207

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the duck-and-cover dept.
The Register writes "Sun invited Oracle president Charles Phillips and chief corporate architect Edward Screven to an employee-only town hall this Wednesday, where they took questions on what's coming. They said they'd be 'crazy' to close Java, that Oracle 'needs' MySQL, and all Sun's processors look appealing. They hedged on OpenOffice — Phillips said he couldn't comment on any product line — and on Sun's work in high-performance computing. Screven made it pretty clear the Sun vision of cloud computing does not fit with Oracle's; Oracle sees itself as a provider of infrastructure like virtualization to make clouds, not a provider of hosted services. As for who's staying and who's getting cut at Sun: Phillips said Oracle needs Sun, but warned 'tough decisions' will be coming. Don't forget, this is the company that couriered pink slips to the PeopleSoft staff it cut following that acquisition."
Books

Lose Your Amazon Account and Your Kindle Dies 419

Posted by timothy from the just-give-us-the-money-and-nobody-gets-hurt dept.
Mike writes "If you buy a Kindle and some Kindle ebooks from Amazon, be careful of returning items. Amazon decided that one person had returned too many things, so they suspended his Amazon account, which meant that he could no longer buy any Kindle books, and any Kindle subscriptions he's paid for stop working. After some phone calls, Amazon granted him a one-time exception and reactivated his account again." Take this with as much salt as you'd like.
Media

Submission + - Major League Baseball wipes out DRM licenses 1

Submitted by cuban321
cuban321 writes:
Major League Baseball has switched DRM providers, forcing customers who bought videos from their old system to buy them again if they want to continue watching them. From one of its victims, sportswriter Allan Wood: "MLB no longer supports the DDS system that it once used and so any CDs with downloaded games on them 'are no good. They will not work with the current system.' ...I was told there is absolutely nothing MLB can do about these lost games. Plus, they said my purchases were all 'one-time sale' and thus 'there are no refunds.'"
Supercomputing

Submission + - SETI@Home is now the World's Fastest Supercomputer

Submitted by jemecki
jemecki writes: I was looking through the distributed computing statistics at BOINCstats today and I noticed that SETI@Home distributed computing grid just passed 280 TeraFLOPS in computing power. The reason this is so remarkable is that the fastest supercomputer in the world Blue Gene/L ALSO operates at a sustained 280 TeraFLOPS. So while governments are busy using their supercomputers to model bombs and nuclear weapons, the geeks have put together the world's fastest computer and they're using it to look for aliens. Awesome.

End of Win 98 Support May Boost Desktop Linux 581

Posted by timothy from the not-sure-about-the-demographic-overlap dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft kills off support for Windows 98 and Windows ME today, and ZDNet is reporting that the move will boost demand for Linux on the desktop. Unlike two years ago — when support for Win98 was extended because Linux was seen as a serious competitor — this time it seems there is no turning back."

Microsoft Developing iPod, iTMS Competitor 304

Posted by Zonk from the head-to-head dept.
Software writes "Reuters reports that Microsoft is developing an iPod and iTunes Music Store competitor. Few details are available, but it's known that Robbie Bach (the man behind the Xbox) is heading up the project." From the article: "Most iTunes rivals charge monthly fees to access a catalog of entertainment, but some allow consumers to buy individual songs for about $1 each. Microsoft's service will emphasize the pay-per-download, or a la carte, model, the sources said. A subscription component will also be offered, according to early accounts of the planned service. One source, who has seen a demonstration of the service, said it was an improvement over iTunes."

How Not to Steal a Sidekick 424

Posted by timothy from the quick-add-a-buddy dept.
timmit was one of many readers to point out the story of a stolen Sidekick, writing with this excerpt from the site: ""When my friend realized that she had left the Sidekick in the taxi she asked me to immediately send a message to the phone saying that we would give a reward for the phone. There was no response. After a day of waiting, she had to go to the store and spend over $300 on a new Sidekick. When she put her SIM card in, she saw that the person(s) that had taken the phone had not only signed on to AOL leaving their name and password in the phone, but they had taken pictures of themselves." I can sympathize, after someone with the address Rmluckyguy@aol.com tried to sell me back the Visor Deluxe stolen from my car last year in Philadelphia. I hope Evan has better luck.

Slashdot Top Deals

It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.

Close