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Delchanat points out a blog entry which notes, "The two biggest computing-providers of today, Amazon and Google, are building their concurrent offerings on top of really concurrent programming languages and systems. Not only because they want to, but because they need to. If you want to build computing into a utility, you need large real-time systems running as efficiently as possible. You need your technology to be able to scale in a similar way as other, comparable utilities or large real-time systems are scaling — utilities like telephony and electricity. Erlang is a language that has all the right properties and mechanisms in place to do what utility computing requires. Amazon SimpleDB is built upon Erlang. IMDB (owned by Amazon) is switching from Perl to Erlang. Google Gears is using Erlang-style concurrency, and the list goes on."

Except this was entered as evidence in the DoJ trial. It's real and on the books.

Nuclear is the current best option yes, but you shouldn't dump all your eggs into one basket either.

There is a very limited supply of easily accessable fissable material on earth. The more plants we build the more the cost of *THAT* will go up.

People really need to start investing in sustainable renewable energy, things like tidal, wind, solar, and what IMO is the most untapped, geothermal. Seriously, we have all these active volcanos around the planet exerting kilotons of energy spewing gasses into the air and creating massive amounts of heat, why aren't we harnessing that more?

I hope this finally serves as a "wake up call" for Linux lickers and lovers that using Linux does increase chances of violence and murder. For too long now Linux lovers have accused Microsoft of tomfoolery, when Microsoft has only delivered wholesome, moral, and radidly patched products.

Perhaps now they'll finally start listening to the studies that Linux and open-source leads to genital herpes and PWNING your wife with a .45 and a shovel.

It's just Gaia self-regulating again - the good thing is that she's not got an immune system, or we'd all be gobbled up by large white cells (images of 'The Prisoner' being chased by those latex balls spring to mind).

We're all going to die, but most of us will make it to three score and ten unless the Israelis start WWIII - if this 'green side effect' is powerful enough, then our descendants may make it as well.

It just goes to show what a wonderful self-regulating system evolution has produced.

Why are we so offended by the concept that someone might be irritated by WiFi signals?

I mean shouldn't we figure out, using a scientific methodology, if they can in fact detect Wifi rather than assuming they can't?

Although we believe it isn't possible to hear this part of the spectrum we also know that birds and other animals can detect it without the use of their hearing and thus it could be part of some humans (or the next step of human evolution).

Just saying, don't be so offended and dismissive. You sound like a bunch of cavemen.

I have 2 computers running Vista. Neither of them came bundled with it. I am very happy with Vista... I haven't had any problems at all (even though I will likely be modded as such, I am not trolling).

What's linux?

The future.

Although it was quite funny, it's a straw man and the study itself has some serious flaws. Some people really do have serious glandular problems or diseases causing obesity. My cousin was a beautiful young woman until she developed lupus... she went from somewhere around 120 pounds to, well, I'm not going to speculate. I'm not sure what exactly caused the obesity, it could have been anything from hormonal changes to medications she had to take, but I know her house isn't exactly filled with twinkies. I feel terrible walking around with her in public. Not because I'm embarrassed to be with an obese woman, but because I get so upset at the looks people give us. People look at her like she just killed and ate their favorite pet, then they look at me with a slightly different look of disgust.

In addition, I feel that while this may be accurate, we'd be pushing the environmentalism too far to cite it as a reason for people to lose weight. Even if it would save some energy, fuel, and materials, all of the savings are overshadowed by the significant social and medical advantages. If we could waste just a little more food and fuel to ensure a longer life expectancy, we would.

Of course, this study isn't really very good. While the global demand for food would likely drop, you'd have a significant jump in energy and oil prices. All of the formerly obese Americans, spending hundreds less on food every month, would be ready to hit the beaches, ski slopes, etc. with their extra money and less embarrassing bodies.

Finally, BMI is a shoddy system that I'm sick of seeing. BMI was developed at a time when leeching was an accepted medical practice, and hasn't changed significantly since then. BMI can not differentiate between lean mass and lard. This means that a society of body builders would have the same average BMI as a society of, well, lazy Americans.

Getting back to serious topics, it's very important to note that global food shortages (and corresponding rises in prices) are not caused by increased demand. They're caused by reduced supply, which has been, in part, caused by food aid programs. When people become dependent on food aid programs, a small series of events can raise food prices enough that food aid programs can't afford to send food. You can imagine how well this works out for impoverished areas that have lost their indigenous food production capability.

canuck57 writes "PC World has the scoop on XP SP3 crippling some machines. Mine is a HP/Compaq AMD X2 w. MS-Windows XP MCE which has run flawlessly for over 2 years — and yes, I got endless reboots. I found the work around here. Fortunately I could get safe mode and did the rename. So what are /.ers 2 cents take on this? Is this AMD, Intel, vendor or Microsoft issue?

Installing Windows XP Service Pack 3 sends some PCs into an endless series of reboots, according to posts to a Microsoft support forum.

Jesper Johansson, a former program manager for security policy at Microsoft and a prominent Windows blogger, has worked with users to tentatively identify the problem as involving only machines using processors from Advanced Micro Devices .

Messages from frustrated users began accumulating on the XP SP3 support newsgroup Wednesday, just a day after Microsoft released the update to the general public.

"I just installed Windows XP SP3 and after completing the processes and when the system reboots, the system cannot proceed to load the Windows," said a user labeled as "Olin" in a message that kicked off a long thread . "It just displays the flash screen of Windows then after it reboots again."

Most users who left messages on the forum said that they were unable to boot into Windows Safe mode — a last-ditch way to sidestep the normal boot process for troubleshooting purposes — or revert to a previously saved System Restore point.

The full PC World story

"
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,145689/article.html?tk=nl_dnxnws

An anonymous reader writes "You know SELinux is built to be virtually attack-proof, but do you know how the National Security Agency (NSA) accomplish it? Take a closer look at the SELinux kernel architecture, why this is important, and what makes SELinux one of the most secure implementations of Linux available."

The Canadian DMCA is set to be introduced within the next few weeks. Not only is Canada likely to follow the U.S. approach on anti-circumvention, but now the French government claims that it will also adopt a "three strikes and you're out" approach that requires ISPs to cut off subscribers after three allegations of illegal file sharing.

UnknowingFool writes "Everyone's favorite CEO Darl McBride took the stand on Wednesday April 30 in Novell v. SCO. Chris Brown has posted his account on Groklaw of the 2nd day of trial. The first day's account can be found here. To refresh your memory in this ongoing case, Judge Kimball has already ruled that Novell owns the copyrights to Unix and has practically dismissed all of SCO's claims. This portion of the trial is about Novell's counterclaims that SCO never paid them the money from the Sun and MS deals. What is to be determined in this trial is how much of the money from the deals were for Unix licensing (SVRx) and how much were for SCO's server technology (Unixware)." (Read on for the rest, below.)

Here's a short update on the recent Novell Vs SCO case we've been following. Our good friend Darl McBride made some interesting comments in court yesterday. He stated (under oath): "many Linux contributors were originally UNIX developers ... We have evidence System V is in Linux ... When you go to the bookstore and look in the UNIX section, there's books on 'How to Program UNIX' but when you go to the Linux section and look for 'How to Program Linux' you're not gonna find it, because it doesn't exist. Linux is a copy of UNIX, there is no difference [between them]." This flies directly in the face of what SCO found in extensive investigations in 2002 and did not correspond with what SCO Senior Vice President Chrs Sontag just finished testifying earlier that day. Mmmmmm, that's some good perjury!
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080501-deluded-sco-ceo-on-witness-stand-linux-is-a-copy-of-unix.html

canuck57 writes "Funny how this gets announced as Ubuntu 8.04 is released. But Dell is going to continue to ship XP to 2010. And then this story also...

The death of Windows XP may have been greatly exaggerated.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the company could re-evaluate its plans to phase out Windows XP by June 30, if customers demand that it stick around. So far, they have not.

"XP will hit an end-of-life. We have announced one. If customer feedback varies, we can always wake up smarter, but right now, we have a plan for end-of-life for new XP shipments," Ballmer said during a Thursday news conference, according to Reuters.

Big-name computer makers are still scheduled to have to stop selling models with Windows XP installed by the end of June. Mainstream technical support will continue to be available for Windows XP through April 2009, and more limited support will continue through April 2014.

Full story on news.com"
http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207401829