9497748
submission
Glyn Moody writes:
Once again, the British Library is working with Microsoft to encourage people to use proprietary technologies instead of open ones. This time, it's giving away some open source code aimed at academic researchers, but with the catch that this software needs Windows Server, SQL Server, .NET Framework and SharePoint to work. Do publicly-funded libraries have a duty to promote open formats and open source, or is this kind of approach acceptable?
9435910
submission
Trailrunner7 writes:
Adobe has acknowledged that an internal screw-up caused a potentially dangerous Flash Player flaw to remain unpatched for more than 16 months after it was first reported by an external security researcher. "It slipped through the cracks," said Emmy Huang, a product manager for Flash Player. Adobe's mea-culpa follows the public release of proof-of-concept code demonstrating a Flash Player browser plug-in crash.
9348152
submission
anthemaniac writes:
Ernest Shackleton's expedition to the South Pole in 1907-09 ran short on supplies and turned back. But they apparently had plenty to drink. Five crates of Scotch whiskey and two crates of brandy have been recovered more than 100 years later ... some still have the liquor inside.
9226274
submission
ruphus13 writes:
Monty Widenius has been a vocal critic of the Oracle acquisition of Sun, fearing for the future of MySQL. Now that the deal is pretty much done, Monty is very skeptical on the future, especially for the Open Source version of MySQL, and fears a 'bait and switch' from Oracle. From the interview, "It's clear that Oracle is in the game for the profit and it's in their interest to get out as much money from MySQL as they can over the long term. There will be less development of the Community version of MySQL. MySQL Enterprise will over time be only available as closed source and with a different feature set than the Community version. By keeping the price very low in the beginning for MySQL Enterprise, they will have a high conversation rate as it will be much easier to move to this than to another database. This will create an efficient lock-in and make it very hard for a MySQL 'fork' to survive or get traction, as it's almost impossible to keep things compatible. When Oracle finally raises prices, most users just have to pay..."
9190594
submission
grrlscientist writes:
A team of paleontologists from the University of Leicester devised a new method for extracting information from 500 million year old fossils: they studied the rate and sequence of decomposition for individual physical features to better understand how our ancient fish-like ancestors might have originally looked. The team's data revealed a surprisingly consistent pattern of decomposition throughout time. This pattern shows that as these modern fish decayed, the most recently evolved features — those characters that are most informative because they distinguish closely related animals within the same lineage — rotted first. The last features to disappear were more ancient; those that are shared by all vertebrates, such the notochord. These findings indicate that some of the earliest vertebrate fossils may have been more evolutionarily advanced than previously thought.
9150896
submission
quaith writes:
A report by GrrlScientist on a just published article in Science describes a new fossil theropod from the early Late Jurassic. Theropods are the group of meat-eating dinosaurs that include velociraptors and Tyrannosaurus Rex. GrrlScientist says in her post "Currently, most scientists think that birds are modern dinosaurs, but because small hollow bones like those of birds and small dinosaurs don't fossilize well, the early fossil record for birds is sparse." This fossil, found in China's Gobi Desert, is a three-dimensionally preserved nearly complete skeleton. It has has features of both dinosaurs and birds and strengthens the dinosaur-bird hypothesis.
