Comment Re:Simple (Score 1) 250
Beautifully said.
Submission + - SCO blames Linux for bankruptcy filing 4
Stony Stevenson writes: SCO Group CEO Darl McBride says competition from the open source Linux operating system was a major reason why the company was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday.
In a court filing in support of SCO's bankruptcy petition, McBride noted that SCO's sales of Unix-based products "have been declining over the past several years." The slump, McBride said, "has been primarily attributable to significant competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux."
McBride listed IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix."
In a court filing in support of SCO's bankruptcy petition, McBride noted that SCO's sales of Unix-based products "have been declining over the past several years." The slump, McBride said, "has been primarily attributable to significant competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux."
McBride listed IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix."
Submission + - Rising PC Surveillance leading to Divorce Courts
Hugh Pickens writes: ""Google and Yahoo may know everything, but they don't really care about you," says one divorce attorney but "no one cares more about the things you do than the person that used to be married to you." Read an article from the New York Times on how traces of Web site visits, mobile telephone records, and hacked e-mail accounts are becoming the fodder for divorce proceedings. One lawyer says three-quarters of her cases now involve some kind of electronic communications and that she routinely asks judges for court orders to seize and copy the hard drives of her clients' spouses. Although lawyers must navigate a complex legal landscape governing the admissibility of electronic evidence, if the computer in question is shared by the whole family, or couples have revealed their passwords to each other, reading a spouse's e-mail messages and introducing them as evidence in a divorce case is often allowed. "The only thing you can truly erase these things with is a specialty Smith & Wesson product," says one investigator. "Throw your computer into the air and play skeet with it.""
Submission + - post-apocalyptic world of lego (flickr.com)
6 writes: Lego dioramas of a dark and bricky future
Submission + - Global Warming Criticism Ignored by Media
krygny writes: EARTHtimes.org reports: "A new analysis of peer-reviewed literature reveals that more than 500 scientists have published evidence refuting at least one element of current man-made global warming scares. (...) Despite being published in such journals such as Science, Nature and Geophysical Review Letters, these scientists have gotten little media attention.
Submission + - How terrorists profit from drugs (populistamerica.com)
populist writes: "Why drug profits are big
If a large volume for some product is sufficient to finance terrorism, why don't terrorists raise money by selling computers or aspirin or food?
Well, why don't they?
The answer is that those products generate very small profits per sale, while drug profits are astronomical.
Whenever the profits in computers, aspirin or food increase, the supply of the item expands — pushing prices and profits back again to levels similar to those of other products.
And why are drug profits astronomical?
Because drugs are illegal.
If drugs were legal — if Smith Kline, Eli Lilly or Bayer could sell drugs — prices would be so low that the profit would be no larger than in computers or food. So how could the terrorists make big money in such a business?"
If a large volume for some product is sufficient to finance terrorism, why don't terrorists raise money by selling computers or aspirin or food?
Well, why don't they?
The answer is that those products generate very small profits per sale, while drug profits are astronomical.
Whenever the profits in computers, aspirin or food increase, the supply of the item expands — pushing prices and profits back again to levels similar to those of other products.
And why are drug profits astronomical?
Because drugs are illegal.
If drugs were legal — if Smith Kline, Eli Lilly or Bayer could sell drugs — prices would be so low that the profit would be no larger than in computers or food. So how could the terrorists make big money in such a business?"
Submission + - Did SCO get lynched? (fortune.com)
dingbatdr writes: Roger Parloff argues that SCO got a raw deal. He says that Judge Kimball was out of line in making a summary judgement and should have let the case go to trial.
Submission + - AMD Releases 900+ Pages Of GPU Specs (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Ending off the X Developer Summit this year, Matthew Tippett handed off ATI's GPU specifications to David Airlie on a CD (as reported by Daniel Stone). However, the specifications are also now available on the Internet! At http://www.x.org/docs/AMD/ is the location of the documentation where you can freely download the files. Right now there is the RV630 Register Reference Guide and M56 Register Reference Guide. The RV630 Reference Guide is 434 pages long while the M56 Guide is 460 pages. Expect more documentation (and 3D specifications) to arrive shortly. The new open-source R500/600 driver will be released early next week. More information to come soon. Tell us what you think. For more information, read our ATI/AMD's New Open-Source Strategy Explained article.
Submission + - Official prototype of kilogram mysteriously losing (komotv.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The 118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the metric mass, kept tightly under lock and key outside Paris, is mysteriously losing weight — if ever so slightly. Physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, southwest of Paris, says the reference kilo appears to have lost 50 micrograms compared with the average of dozens of copies.
Submission + - Cassini's Spectacular Iapetus Flyby
cupofjoe writes: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is reporting on the Cassini spacecraft's recent close flyby of the Saturnian moon Iapetus, highlighting images taken from distances 100 times closer than the Voyager 2 flyby in 1981. Near real-time images were shown to Cassini mission team members in a presentation at JPL yesterday, during which a pre-recorded message from Arthur C. Clarke was played to the audience. Clarke wished them luck on the flyby, reminding all present that he had included a pretty accurate description of Iapetus in the original 1968 text of "2001: A Space Odyssey", years before Voyager made its flyby. The images are pretty spectacular, trumping the mosaic shot during Cassini's New Years' 2004 flyby — no sign of the Star Gate, though.
