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GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - Frank Zappa's Influence on Linux and FOSS developm (devx.com)

Submitted by Roblimo
Roblimo writes: Zappa's Dinah-Moe Hummm is totally about Linux, at least in spirit, while the song Montana, with its talk of zirconium-encrusted tweezers and dental floss, "is obviously about Mac users." Not only that: In the early 70s Zappa wrote a song called Penguin in Bondage, an obvious foretelling of the anti-Linux lawsuits and threats from SCO, Microsoft, and other evildoers. Zappa was also a heavy user of the Synclavier, an electronic music-machine that was a precursor to today's "studio on a computer" recording and sound editing software. According to the article on DevX, today Zappa would no doubt be using Linux and Ardour for most of his recording and composition.
Image

Police Called Over 11-Year-Old's Science Project 687

Posted by samzenpus from the duck-and-cover dept.
garg0yle writes "Police in San Diego were called to investigate an 11-year-old's science project, consisting of 'a motion detector made out of an empty Gatorade bottle and some electronics,' after the vice-principal came to the conclusion that it was a bomb. Charges aren't being laid against the youth, but it's being recommended that he and his family 'get counseling.' Apparently, the student violated school policies — I'm assuming these are policies against having any kind of independent thought?"
Science

Programmable Quantum Computer Created 132

Posted by Soulskill from the four-out-of-five-ain't-bad dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A team at NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) used berylium ions, lasers and electrodes to develop a quantum system that performed 160 randomly chosen routines. Other quantum systems to date have only been able to perform single, prescribed tasks. Other researchers say the system could be scaled up. 'The researchers ran each program 900 times. On average, the quantum computer operated accurately 79 percent of the time, the team reported in their paper.'"

Comment The ABC's (Score 1) 1021

by stuffduff (#29649785) Attached to: What Belongs In a High School Sci-Fi/Fantasy Lit Class?
Start with some of the classics: Asimov (I Robot), Bradbury (The Illustrated Man, Martian Chronicles), Clarke (A Fall of Moondust) These stories are both good examples of sci-fi but also good examples of storytelling. In I Robot the Three Laws are a wonderful premise for stories that have spawned a wide following. In A Fall of Moondust a simple physical fact and its implications for human survival become captivating suspense. The early works of Heinline like The Past Through Tomorrow what technology does to our humanity. I'd suggest that you begin with shorter works and work towards one longer work, however Dune, or Stranger in a Strange Land are not good first semester works, nor would hard scifi like Forward. Nourse's The Universe Between, L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time are great for younger kids but probably too simplistic for High School. Explore where technology puts us into unusual situations and how those situations impact our humanity. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep - where do we draw the line of what is and isn't human?. Maybe throw a changeup with a book that really explores what it means to be alien like Brin's Uplift series (Startide Rising) or Cherryh's Chanur series (Chanur's Venture). Or some Gibson. Let the stories awaken their minds to new possibilities, after all that's what its all about.

Comment Lagging Behind the OS Curve (Score 0, Troll) 248

by stuffduff (#29190695) Attached to: Nielsen Struggles To Track Modern Viewing Habits
Nielsen has software to participate in their web rating service which though all in java has never been ported to Linux. After a decade of explaining that I also use Linux and not being able to get any action on that front I gave up. If you really want to be a player in the ratings business you need to be where the people are who you want to follow, not changing your sample source to keep the relative value of your investment intact at the expense of being able to follow your demographic. Nielsen wake up! It's no longer the 1950's!

Comment Age Before Beauty (Score 2, Informative) 154

by stuffduff (#29132423) Attached to: Amazon, MS, Google Clouds Flop In Stress Tests
I'm not surprised that these 'Johnny-come-latelys' are having issues. M (Mumps) has had an integrated schemaless database for forty years now and has the tool chain to go with it. The language and the data structure are seamlessly integrated, a concept that was all but wiped out by the relational database movement of the 70's. It's a shame to see this emphasis on schemaless databases is so totally ignorant of both its prior history and the lessons that Mumps has to offer. Ignorance is bliss...
User Journal

Journal Journal: How to convince others to open source software? 1

Journal by stuffduff
About two years ago I wrote a piece of software that sits squarely in between two open source products. Two years later I'm no further along in getting my company to agree to open source the software. What suggestions do Slashdot readers have to help me convince the powers that be that the software should be open sourced?
Caldera

Submission + - Best Example of SCO's Absurd Claims

Submitted by
UnknowingFool
UnknowingFool writes: "Groklaw has posted IBM's explanation of SCO's claims about control of derivatives. For those who haven't been paying attention, SCO claims that IBM had no right to put their original code like JFS and RCU into Linux because IBM had access to and used SysV code, methods, and concepts in AIX and Dynix. For SCO, all of Dynix and AIX are derivatives and thus under the control of SCO regardless of who actually wrote the code. IBM's addendum illustrates that if the court accepts that argument, then SCO could claim that they own all internet devices like Blackberry's and satellites because TCP/IP (while developed independently by BSD) was included at one time in the past with AT&T Unix code."
Mars

Submission + - Massive Ice Deposits on South Pole of Mars

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "It has been discovered that the red planet has a 2.3 mile thick ice layer the size of Texas on its southern pole. That's enough water to cover the planet in 36 feet (almost 11 meters) of water. Although some scientists still aren't satisfied and predict more water somewhere on Mars: "... it appears perhaps 10 percent of the water that once existed on Mars is now trapped in these polar deposits. Other water may exist below the planet's surface or perhaps some was lost into space through the atmosphere.""
Security

Submission + - Black Hat Woman: Researcher Who Hacked Vista

Submitted by ancientribe
ancientribe writes: 26-year-old Polish researcher Joanna Rutkowksa has already hacked the Windows Vista kernel, administered a Blue Pill to an operating system, and pioneered rootkit detection research, but she still doesn't know how to drive a car. In this Dark Reading up-close profile of Rutkowska, she talks about her fears that security research is too heavily focused on prevention rather than detection, and how she'd like to be a private "I" or a fiction writer someday.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=119 576&WT.svl=news1_2

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