Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Linux Business

"FOSS Business Model Broken" — Former OSDL CEO 412

Posted by kdawson from the who-needs-support-anyway dept.
liraz writes "Stuart Cohen, former CEO of Open Source Development Labs, has written an op-ed on BusinessWeek claiming that the traditional open source business model, which relies solely on support and service revenue streams, is failing to meet the expectations of investors. He discusses the 'great paradox' of the FOSS business model, saying: 'For anyone who hasn't been paying attention to the software industry lately, I have some bad news. The open source business model is broken. Open source code is generally great code, not requiring much support. So open source companies that rely on support and service alone are not long for this world.' Cohen goes on to outline the beginnings of a business model that can work for FOSS going forward."
Google

Submission + - Google engineers cannot speak binary (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by
buruonbrails
buruonbrails writes: "With all the thousands of engineers at google, you'd think someone speaks binary. But perhaps not. Attendees of the Google I/O conference were given t-shirts that, presumably, were supposed to spell GOOGLEIO on the front in binary. Just one problem, the actual message printed spells GOOGLEKO"
Math

Submission + - a^4+b^4+c^4+d^4 has infinite solutions

Submitted by VernonNemitz
VernonNemitz writes: This came out a couple months ago and seems to have been missed by the Slashdot crowd.

Quoting from http://www.physorg.com/news124726812.html:
"Recently, mathematician Daniel J. Madden and retired physicist, Lee W. Jacobi, found solutions to a puzzle that has been around for centuries. Jacobi and Madden have found a way to generate an infinite number of solutions for a puzzle known as 'Euler's Equation of degree four.'"
Television

Eight Years of Games On the Daily Show 22

Posted by Zonk from the and-now-your-moment-of-zen dept.
In the wake of the release of eight years of Daily Show clips onto the internet, Joystiq has done us the great favour of tracking down almost every game reference during the show's run. Check out the embedded videos to see John Stewart talk Pac-man in Baghdad, Ice Cube's enthusiasm for the Dreamcast, and Lewis Black's take on DOA Extreme Beach Volleyball
Linux Business

Submission + - Michael Dell says Linux server sales are up (silicon.com)

Submitted by
00_NOP
00_NOP writes: "Linux is growing faster in the server space than Windows says the Dell CEO:

"On the server side Linux continues to grow nicely, a bit faster than Windows. We're seeing a move to Linux in critical applications, and Linux migration has not slowed down."

With Netcraft statistics in recent months showing a big increase in Windows as a webserver and with the renewed assault on Linux's legitimacy over the issue of software patents — not a problem for those of us in Europe ;-) — this is reassuring news for FOSS advocates."
Programming

Submission + - Indian AI unmasked using second order turing test (daz.com)

Submitted by
jacquesm
jacquesm writes: "Indian IT experts have been testing a new generation of highly intelligent bots in IRC channels. One such bot was unmasked in an irc room after failing to pass a second order Turing Test. The bot had to be tricked into accepting the challenge and tried every trick in the book to avoid detection.

The full transcript of the interaction with the bot (called 'asterix') is here : http://ww.com/asterixbot.html , the really interesting breakthrough I think is the fact that the bot uses 'broken english' to masquerade its lack of genuine understanding, but we have become so accustomed to that because of the outsourcing of jobs that it is no longer politically correct to accept nothing less than passable english. This psychological loophole has been used to great profit by the team involved.

It's only a matter of time before you'll have to administer Turing Tests to your chat room friends to see if they are not too tired of communicating with you face to face and have replaced their online identities with bots to keep up appearances."
Sun Microsystems

Sun To Release 8-Core Niagara 2 Processor 214

Posted by CowboyNeal from the screw-everything-we're-going-eight-cores dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Sun Microsystems is set to announce its eight-core Niagara 2 processor next week. Each core supports eight threads, so the chip handles 64 simultaneous threads, making it the centerpiece of Sun's "Throughput Computing" effort. Along with having more cores than the quads from Intel and AMD, the Niagara 2 have dual, on-chip 10G Ethernet ports with cryptographic capability. Sun doesn't get much processor press, because the chips are used only in its own CoolThreads servers, but Niagara 2 will probably be the fastest processor out there when it's released, other than perhaps the also little-known 4-GHz IBM Power 6."
Operating Systems

Old School Linux Remembered, Parts 0.02 & 0.03 163

Posted by CowboyNeal 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.'"

Slashdot Top Deals

Neutrinos have bad breadth.

Close