pure_chownage - Slashdot User

Denmark Becomes Fourth Nation To Protest OOXML 171

Posted by kdawson on Sunday June 01, 2008 @10:47PM from the i-do-believe-it's-a-convoy dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The rumors of a fourth OOXML complaint turned out to be true. Denmark has become the fourth nation to protest the ISO's acceptance of OOXML, and Groklaw has a translation of their complaint. They now join India, Brazil, and South Africa. There are going to be plenty of questions about deadlines, because people have been given two different deadlines for appeals, and the final DIS of OOXML was late in being distributed and not widely available. In fact, that seems to be one of Denmark's complaints, along with missing XML schemas, contradictory wording, lack of interoperability, and troubles with the maintenance of DIS29500. In other words, we should expect a lot of wrangling over untested rules from here on out, and Microsoft knows how to deal with that."

A Home Lab/Shop For Kids? 291

Posted by kdawson on Sunday June 01, 2008 @08:50PM from the treasures-from-edmund dept.

sharp-bang writes "When I was growing up, my Dad let my brother and I have the run of his wood shop, and kept up a steady stream of Lego kits, Estes model rockets, chemistry sets, Heathkit projects, and other fun science stuff from the Edmund Scientific catalog, and the rest was history. I'd like to give my kids that kind of experience. If your kids were interested in science, computers, robots, and building stuff, how would you build and outfit a lab/shop for them (and you) to play in?"

Explosion At ThePlanet Datacenter Drops 9,000 Servers 431

Posted by kdawson on Sunday June 01, 2008 @02:07PM from the could-happen-to-anyone dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Customers hosting with ThePlanet, a major Texas hosting provider, are going through some tough times. Yesterday evening at 5:45 pm local time an electrical short caused a fire and explosion in the power room, knocking out walls and taking the entire facility offline. No one was hurt and no servers were damaged. Estimates suggest 9,000 servers are offline, affecting 7,500 customers, with ETAs for repair of at least 24 hours from onset. While they claim redundant power, because of the nature of the problem they had to go completely dark. This goes to show that no matter how much planning you do, Murphy's Law still applies." Here's a Coral CDN link to ThePlanet's forum where staff are posting updates on the outage. At this writing almost 2,400 people are trying to read it.

Elonex ONE Subnotebook Shows Right Path For Linux 177

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday June 01, 2008 @09:05AM from the no-fuss-just-tux dept.

davidmwilliams writes "Whether it was to your taste or not, there's no denying the ASUS Eee Linux subnotebook was a massive sales success. Demand far exceeded initial production so it's not surprising competitor models are on their way. Just like the Eee, the Elonex achieves cost savings by bundling freely redistributable open source software including, of course, the Linux operating system (specifically, Linos 2.6.21). Those who use the Elonex ONE may well understand it uses something called Linux under the hood, but they don't really have to grasp what this means. They don't have to care that the WiFi hardware was carefully chosen to be one of the exclusive few which has supported Linux drivers. They don't need to tamper with the way their family computer is already set up."

Pringles Can Designer Dies, Buried In a Pringles Can 261

Posted by kdawson on Sunday June 01, 2008 @02:42AM from the can-you-hear-me-now dept.

n3hat sends along an item from the Cincinnati Enquirer: "Dr. Fredric J. Baur was so proud of having designed the container for Pringles... that he asked his family to bury him in one. His children honored his request. Part of his remains was buried in a Pringles can — along with a regular urn containing the rest... Dr. Baur, a retired organic chemist and food storage technician who specialized in research and development and quality control for Procter & Gamble, died May 4 at 89... He developed many products, including frying oils and a freeze-dried ice cream, for P&G... But the Pringles can was his proudest accomplishment, his daughter said. He received a patent for the package as well as the method of packaging Pringles in 1970."

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