xoundmind - Slashdot User

Submission + - Major "Internal Reorganization" at Linspir

Submitted by Linspire Insider on Friday August 03, 2007 @01:47PM

Linspire Insider writes: Just two and a half weeks after the Deal with Microsoft, Linspire President and CEO Kevin Carmony was asked to clear out his locker on July 31st. And yesterday, August 2nd, several additional people were laid off or fired, or just quit, including most of the OS team and their only localization expert. In total, seven employees were lost, bringing the company roster down to around fifteen people. All this, despite the large influx of cash from their recent partnership, shows that Microsoft deal was useless to more than just users.

The near disbanding of the OS team is indicative of a major shift in the company's business model, now focusing almost entirely on their Click-N'-Run service.

Submission + - Newfound Planet Has Earth-Like Orbit (space.com)

Submitted by

Raver32

on Friday August 03, 2007 @12:12PM

Raver32 writes: "The new planet, spotted using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas, circles its bloated parent star every 360 days and is located about 300 light-years away, in the constellation Perseus. The red giant star is twice as massive and about 10 times larger than the sun. Its planet is about the size of Jupiter or larger and was discovered using the so-called wobble technique, in which astronomers look for slight wiggles in a star's motion created by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets. The discovery could help astronomers understand what will happen to our sun's brood of planets when it exhausts its store of hydrogen fuel and its outer envelope begins to swell. When that happens in an estimated 5 billion years, our sun will be so big that it will engulf the inner planets and most likely Earth. But long before that happens, life on our planet will have perished and its seas will have boiled away."

Old School Linux Remembered, Parts 0.02 & 0.03 163

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday August 02, 2007 @11:14PM from the turn-back-the-clock dept.

eldavojohn writes "Following our last history lesson of Linux 0.01, the Kernel Trap is talking about the following announcements that would lead to one of the greatest operating systems today. A great Linus quote on release 0.02 (just 19 days after 0.01): 'I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "why?". Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got minix. This is a program for hackers by a hacker. I've enjoyed [sic] doing it, and somebody might enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for their own needs. It is still small enough to understand, use and modify, and I'm looking forward to any comments you might have.'"

Submission + - Chernobyl Mushrooms Feeding on Radiation

Submitted by cowtamer on Thursday August 02, 2007 @07:52PM

cowtamer writes: According to a National Geographic Article certain fungi can use ionizing radiation to perform "radiosynthesis" using the pigment melanin (the same one in our skin that protects us from UV radiation). It is speculated that this might be useful on long space voyages where energy from the Sun is not readily available.

Submission + - Minimig: Amiga on FPGA with GPL'd verilog code (hetnet.nl)

Submitted by

akkartik

on Thursday August 02, 2007 @07:43PM

akkartik writes: "Minimig stands for Mini Amiga. Minimig is an FPGA-based re-implementation of the original Amiga 500 hardware. In it's current form, Minimig is a single PCB measuring only 12*12cm which makes it the smallest "Amiga" ever made and the first new "Amiga" in almost 14 years!"

Submission + - Point and click Gmail hacking at Black Hat (tgdaily.com)

Submitted by

not5150

on Thursday August 02, 2007 @04:51PM

not5150 writes: "Using Gmail or most other webmail programs over an unsecured access points just got a bit more dangerous. At Black Hat, Robert Graham, CEO of errata security, showed how to capture and clone session cookies. He even hijacked a shocked attendee's Gmail account in the middle of his Black Hat speech."

Submission + - Gentoo Linux Release: 2007.0 "Secret Sauce

Submitted by quantumsummers on Tuesday May 08, 2007 @01:01PM

quantumsummers writes: Customization is all about the Sauce, and I am very happy to report that Gentoo Linux has given up the "Secret Sauce".

Gentoo Linux 2007.0 is now available!

Content below is taken from the www.gentoo.org site as written by Chris Gianelloni, a current member of the Gentoo Foundation Board of Trustees.

"The Gentoo Release Engineering project is pleased to announce the much-delayed release of Gentoo Linux 2007.0, code named "Secret Sauce". This release met with several delays due to an abnormally high number of security vulnerabilities in large packages which had to be rebuilt using the newer, secure versions of the packages. There was also a complete resnapshot done about half-way through the release period due to the release taking so long and the packages becoming stale.

You can find out more information about the release in the official press release.
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/releng/release/2007. 0/2007.0-press-release.txt
To get the new release, grab it from http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/where.xml."

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Submission + - Sun to Spend $200M Moving to Oracle 11i

Submitted by

BayBoy

on Tuesday February 06, 2007 @05:32PM

BayBoy writes: "Sun Microsystems will spend more than $200 million consolidating all of its internal business applications onto Oracle 11i, Chief Financial Officer Michael Lehman said at its annual analyst summit. eWeek is reporting here(http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2090954, 00.asp) that this will mark the first time in Sun's history that the entire company will run on a single, common business application system and platform. The first deployment, which goes live this July, will see 1,000 non-Oracle systems inside Sun being turned off, and the entire process is expected to be completed by the end of September 2008."

Submission + - Steve Jobs explains DRM

Submitted by Ma8thew on Tuesday February 06, 2007 @04:48PM

Ma8thew writes: Steve Jobs today published a short essay on the state of DRM and music distribution online. He explains why Apple won't license FairPlay, as well as revealing that Apple would embrace a DRM free future.

For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.
This is despite accusations that Apple desires DRM as a way of locking consumers to iPod.

Submission + - Speaking UNIX: Command-line locution

Submitted by

BlueVoodoo

on Tuesday February 06, 2007 @03:36PM

BlueVoodoo writes: "UNIX has a dialect all its own, and its vocabulary of commands is quite large. But you don't have to learn everything all at once. Here, discover more command-line combinations and expand your mastery of the UNIX language."

Submission + - MIT puts optics on a chip

Submitted by

Roland Piquepaille

on Tuesday February 06, 2007 @03:32PM

Roland Piquepaille writes: "An interdisciplinary team at MIT has found a new way to integrate photonic circuitry on a silicon chip. Their 'optics on a chip' may revolutionize computers and networks with the addition of the power and speed of light waves to traditional electronics. "The new technology will also enable supercomputers on a chip with unique high-speed capabilities for signal processing, spectroscopy and remote testing, among other fields." And because such chips can be mass-manufactured for the first time, the researchers think that their optical components could be integrated on silicon chips within five years. Read more for additional details and an illustration showing the integrated polarization diversity solution found by the MIT team."

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