According to this BetaNews.com story Judge Ronald Freeman of the Miami-Dade Circuit Court has declined to ban Rockstar Games 'Bully' title. Notorious anti-game industry attorney Jack Thompson had sought a ban of the game under the Florida "public nuisance" law. As previously discussed here at Slashdot Judge Freeman actually ordered Rockstar to deliver a copy of the game to the court for review. The Judge spent about two hours reviewing the game before rendering his decision.

The New York Times is running this interview with Linux creator Linus Torvalds. In this interesting interview, Linus addresses everything from SCO, to the RIAA to Microsoft, to a law requiring geeks to have dates. Definitely worth a read.

According to this story at Smart Money, IBM has filed new claims against SCO, alleging violation of the GPL.

Quote from the article: According to the memo, which was obtained by The Wall Street Journal, the new counterclaim charges that SCO infringed IBM's copyrights by distributing IBM's contributions to Linux after SCO had violated its Linux license by claiming a copyright on parts of Linux.

At the least, this seems to be an encouraging sign regarding the validity of the GPL. After all, IBM's lawyers wouldn't be basing claims on it, if they didn't think it had "teeth."

SGI have announced plans to roll out a massive 128 processor Linux system by Spring 2004.

According to the article, SGI are using a customized Linux for this system, but the are supposedly "trying to get their changes accepted by the mainstream Linux community.

But, wait... according to SCO, Linux can't use more than 4 processors, without their IP... will SCO be suing SGI next?

According to this CNN article, NASA is saying that the space shuttle could resume conducting missions as early as a March-April 2004 timeframe.

The next flight will apparently be conducted in broad daylight, with additional monitoring of the launch by cameras capable of detecting any debris / ice / foam which might break off and impact the shuttle.

According to this SuSE press release, SuSE has publically announced their support for RedHat's actions against SCO. Quoting from the press release: 'SCO has already been halted in Germany and we applaud Red Hat's actions to help end their activities in the US -- and beyond. We applaud their efforts to restrict the rhetoric of the SCO group -- and the FUD they are trying to instill -- and will determine quickly what actions SuSE can take to support Red Hat in their efforts.'"

According to this article at News.com, Real Networks will be releasing an open source version of their audio / video player for Linux.

According to this article at news.com, UniLever has decided to replace all it's Unix servers, worldwide, with Linux servers, with a little help from HP.

According to Martin Armitage, the head of Unilever's global infrastructure organization, ". "By 2006 or 2007, we will cease buying any Unix systems at all, and all our focus will be in the Linux area."

Nice win for Linux, in the corporate world, especially in light of all the SCO FUD going around these days.

Sun is making a lot of noise in the open source world today. First, they have
joined OSDL, becoming the last of the four major server manufacturers to do so. Sun also seems to be giving real thought to the possiblities of open-sourcing Java. In this article, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's executive vice president for software, had this to say:

"Sun Software Chief Technology Officer John Fowler has launched discussions of making Java an open-source project, a move Sun would make "to promote innovation and distribution," Schwartz said. "The main appeal open source has for the developer community is that folks love to noodle...What open source tends to do more than anything else is it tends to spark innovation."

The main hangup seems to be the fear of a certain company from Redmond. From the article:

it won't happen anytime soon, though, because of the risk that Microsoft would adopt the technology, then undermine it unchecked because of its immense distribution capability, he said. "When we out-ship Windows in desktop volume, we will look very seriously at open-sourcing Java on the desktop," he said.

According to this article at News.com, Novell is saying they will likely end NetWare development, and move to a strategy of purely providing services which run on top of Linux.

At the same time, Novell have announced that they will be porting their entire GroupWise suite of products to Linux.

This comes on the heels of Novell's acquistion of Ximian, which was recently covered on Slashdot, here, and here.

According to this article at news.com, RedHat has announced that they will begin shipping a new RedHat Enterprise Linux bundle later this year, which will include Eclipse , a popular open-source IDE platform, and JONAS an open-source J2EE application server.

RedHat will also be joining the ObjectWeb consortium, and will participate in ObjectWeb sponsored open-source middleware projects.

Looks like another bold move by RedHat to push Linux into the enterprise space, as well as an example of the growing synergy between Java and Linux when it comes to competing with Microsoft.

Ok, so /. now has this neat Journal feature. I haven't used mine up until now, so here goes nothing....

Inspired by the Good Summer Read article, and needing some refresher material on basic math, before I take Calculus, I went down to Barnes and Noble tonight and snagged a nice haul of new books...

Here's what I got, in no particular order:

The Advent Of The Algorithm, by David Berlinski

I picked this up just because the title caught my eye, and I read the back cover description, and decided it might be fun to read. From the back cover: "In Advent of the Algorithm, David Berlinksi creatively combines history, science, and math to explain and explore the intriguing story of how the algorithm was finally discovered through a succession of brilliant mathematicians and logicians, and how their ideas paved the way for our digital age." Cool, huh?

Quick Arithmetic: A self-teaching guide, by Robert A Carman and Marilyn J. Carman

OK, laugh if you want. I'm about to return to school to finish my bachelors degree in computer science, and I'll need to take 3 semesters of Calculus to do so. Since the last math class I took was nearly 10 years ago, and math is definitely "use it or lose it" stuff, I decided to dig out my old pre-calc book the other day and start doing some review work. Much to my dismay, I found that I'd forgotten even more fundamental shit, hence this book.

Prisoner's Dilemma, by William Poundstone

From the San Francisco Chronicle review: "Both a fascinating biography of Von Neumann... and a brilliant social history of game theory and its role in the Cold War and nuclear arms race." This should be fun to read...

The Thirteen Books of the Elements, Euclid (translated with introduction and commentary by Sir Thomas L. Heath)

What can I say... I like math even if it's not something I'm naturally good at. Anybody who's really interested in math should have the Thirteen Books of the Elements on their shelf, and I'd put off buying this forever... tonight seemed like a good night to ahead and buy this classic set.

Trigonometric Delights, by Eli Maor

Just something else that caught my eye. Skimmed through it, and the back cover description was compelling enough to convince me to snag it. From the back cover: "Trigonometry has always been the black sheep of mathematics. It has a reputation as a dry and difficult subject, a glorified form of geometry complicated by tedious computation. In this book, Eli Maor draws on his remarkable talents as a guide to the world of numbers to dispel that view. Rejecting the usual arid descriptions of sine, cosine, and their trigonometric relatives, he brings the subjec to life in a compelling blend of history, biography and mathematics." 'nuff said.

Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, by John Derbyshire

Again, quoting the back cover:

"The Riemann Hypothesis is one of the deepest of all unsolved problems in mathematics. Unfortunately, it is difficult to state exactly what the hypothesis iis. It is high time that someone would write a book explaining the hypothesis in ways understandable by ordinary mathematicians and even by laymen. Three cheers to Jon Derbyshire for having finally done it" - Martin Gardner

Hey, if Martin Gardner says it's good, I'll take his word for it.

Imaginary Numbers: An Anthology of Marvelous Mathematical Stories, Diversions, Poems, and Musings, edited by William Frucht

I think the title says it all, here.

Enders Game, by Orson Scott Card

Amazingly, while I've always considered myself a big fan of sci-fi (what self respecting geek doesn't, though?) I've never read Enders Game. Probably because my reading tends to go in cycles... I'll read nothing but sci-fi for a year (or more), all horror for a year or two, all mysteries for a year or two, etc.... and I've been largely away from Sci-Fi for, umm, well, a long-time. I'm feeling the urge to get more back into sci-fi now though, so I figured I might as well go ahead and read this classic.

Arithmetic and Algebra... Again, by Brita Immergut and Jean Burr Smith

See above, re: needing to brush up on basic math skills, in advance of taking Calculus (and beyond).