Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - What a dumb a year it's been!

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Fortune's "101 Dumbest Moments in Business" is out for 2007. And what a banner year it has been! Everything from CEO excesses (playing *LOTS* of golf while Merrill Lynch posts the first quarterly loss ever), fancy restaurants with expensive desserts (then the restaurant fails health inspection), sleazy business practices (e.g., Best Buy setting up an in-store web server with higher priced specials), and loads of hilariously defective or just plain unlucky technological stuff (e.g., 365 Main's 3-backup power failure). Apparently you can't be charged with DUI in New Jersey if you are driving a Zamboni (who knew?). Oh, and of course, there's Comcast's surprise porn.
Microsoft

Submission + - Lets all do the Samba! Merry Christmas! (theopensourcerer.com)

Submitted by
The Open Sourcerer
The Open Sourcerer writes: "Fantastic! The EU vs. Microsoft litigation that finished a couple of months ago has finally bourne fruit. The Samba team now have royalty free access to the protocol documentation for Windows Workgroup protocols. Read the full story over on Groklaw. Big thanks are due to PJ for keeping the pressure on the EU so its judgement provided a way for Microsoft to deliver their protocol specs without encumbering users and developers with Patent restrictions and licenses. Merry Christmas — This is a BIG deal for the Open Source Community and what a great way to finish what has been a pretty stonking year for OSS in general."
Desktops (Apple)

Submission + - Mac Intel Virtualization Benchmarking

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: MacTech has a write up on the differences between booting Windows XP in the three different options on an Intel-based Mac. They benchmark Parallels, VMware Fusion and Bootcamp. They come to surprising results in the virtualized options with Parallels on top of VMware's Fusion. In some cases the virtualized OS was faster than the bare metal.
Programming

Submission + - Google Mashup and Web 2.0 storage solutions (ibm.com)

Submitted by
BlueVoodoo
BlueVoodoo writes: "Google Maps API along with DB2 or Informix, PHP, JavaScript, and XML let you create an easy-to-use map with your data on it. Use custom icons, change the map type, create a sidebar, and use event handlers. Once created, manage your mashup data cache. Also, be sure to check out how you can use new Web 2.0 tools, principles, and practices in your company."
The Media

Submission + - Talking to Scoble gets a guy fired

Submitted by
netbuzz
netbuzz writes: "An interview subject on the ScobleShow — hosted by former Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble — has been fired for talking to the press without the permission of his company's public relations department. Certainly not a first, but it does open the door for a discussion about corporate communications and the press in an era of employee blogs and calls for more transparency. Scoble says one lesson he has taken from the episode is to be sure to ask interview subjects beforehand if they've received permission to talk. He won't find many journalists following that advice — and for good reason.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/1693 4"
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Giant microwave turns plastic back to oil (newscientist.com) 1

Submitted by
CarrieSmith
CarrieSmith writes: "A US company is taking plastics recycling to another level — turning them back into the oil they were made from, and gas. All that is needed, claims Global Resource Corporation (GRC), is a finely tuned microwave and — hey presto! — a mix of materials that were made from oil can be reduced back to oil and combustible gas (and a few leftovers). The story includes a video demonstrating how pulverised tyres are reduced to oil, gas, and carbon black — a powder used to make inks and dyes. http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/ dn12141"
Databases

Submission + - Q&A with MySQL's Marten Mickos (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a longish interview http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyId=9&articleId=29442 2&intsrc=hm_topic with Computerworld, MySQL's CEO says that the company has internally debated "many times" whether to make its popular open-source database partially closed-source. He also says he promised to welcome Oracle if they built an 'Unbreakable MySQL' clone, like it did with Red Hat Linux. "I would get an endorsement free of charge, and I would get a competitive situation that I easily could win," he said. Mickos also says he believes there is nothing leftist about open-source, reveals that it took him 12 years to finish college (though he ran a tech firm during that time), and that his prior CEO job before MySQL was a failed sports betting dot-com.
Programming

Submission + - Theoretical parallel computer built for first time (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by James McP
James McP writes: A working computer has been built that for the first time demonstrates the Parallel Random Access Model (PRAM) of parallel processing. According to the Network World article the unnamed machine uses FPGAs to create sixty four 75Mhz CPUs which have a claimed combined performance of "100x" a normal desktop. The PRAM computer was built as part of a NSF grant that has the goal of developing APIs and compiler optimizations to support the PRAM system. As a bonus, if you submit the winning name for the new PRAM computer you can win $500.
IBM

Submission + - IBM computer faster than 1.5 mile stack of laptops (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
jbrodkin
jbrodkin writes: "IBM has built a supercomputer that is faster than the combined power of a stack of laptop computers piled 1.5 miles high. Blue Gene/P will be used by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Max Planck Society for some of the most complex analytical problems ever tackled by a machine. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/062607-ibm-s upercomputer.html"

Microsoft's Virtualization Stance Eying Apple? 238

Posted by Zonk from the shifty-glances dept.
Pisces writes "Over the past several days, Microsoft has flip-flopped on virtualization in Vista, with one ascribing the change in policy to concerns over DRM. A piece at Ars Technica raises another, more likely possibility: fear of Apple. Apple is technically an OEM, and could offer copies of Vista at a discounted price. 'All of this paints a picture in which Apple could use OEM pricing to offer Windows for its Macs at greatly reduced prices and running in a VM. The latter is absolutely crucial; telling users that they need to reboot into their Windows OS isn't nearly as sexy as, say, Coherence in Parallels. If you've never seen Coherence, it's quite amazing. You don't need to run Windows apps in a VM window of Vista. Instead, the apps appear to run in OS X itself, and the environment is (mostly) hidden away. VMWare also has similar technology, dubbed Unity.' Is Microsoft terrified of a world where Windows can be virtualized and forced to take a back seat to Mac OS X or Linux?"
Databases

Submission + - LiquiBase Database Refactoring 1.0 (liquibase.org)

Submitted by
nvoxland
nvoxland writes: "After over a year of active development, LiquiBase 1.0 has been released. LiquiBase is a java-based, LGPL, DBMS-independent library for tracking, managing and applying database changes. It is similar to Rail's Active Migrations, but doesn't suffer from the same problems with multiple developers and branches. It also has many unique features such as 30 refactorings, rollback support, and upgrade script SQL-generation."

Slashdot Top Deals

One way to make your old car run better is to look up the price of a new model.

Close