smussman - Slashdot User

Red Hat Vows To Stand Up To Patent Intimidation 168

Posted by Zonk on Thursday October 11, 2007 @04:36PM from the stiff-upper-lip dept.

mrcgran writes "Eweek is reporting on Red Hat's assurances that can continue to deploy Linux without fear of legal retribution from Microsoft. This, despite the increasingly vocal threats emanating from Redmond. 'In a scathing response to Ballmer's remarks, Red Hat's IP team said the reality is that the community development approach of free and open-source code represents a healthy development paradigm, which, when viewed from the perspective of pending lawsuits related to intellectual property, is at least as safe as proprietary software. "We are also aware of no patent lawsuit against Linux. Ever. Anywhere," the team said in a blog posting.'"

Submission + - Fusion io - the power of 1000 hard drives (tgdaily.com)

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Thursday October 11, 2007 @04:29PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "A new flash storage card from Fusion io could make huge storage area networks go the way of the dinosaur and DoDo bird. The company's upcoming 'ioDrive' combines hundreds of gigabytes of flash storage onto a small computer card and company officials claim that the tiny card could replace banks of hard drives."

Submission + - Olive Oil a Fuel? (interactivegenius.com)

Submitted by

ivorobey

on Thursday October 11, 2007 @04:28PM

ivorobey writes: "Scientists from the Department of Biotechnology and Biological Sciences, at the Hashemite University in Jordan have pretreated olive mill waste in such a way that it becomes a viable substitute for bioethanol."

Submission + - Russian viagra spammer murdered (loonov.com)

Submitted by on Thursday October 11, 2007 @04:15PM

An anonymous reader writes: Alexey Tolstokozhev (btw, in Russian his name means 'Thick Skin'), a Russian spammer, found murdered in his luxury house near Moscow. He has been shot several times with one bullet stuck in his head. According to authorities, this last head shot is a clear mark of russian hit men (known as "killers" in Russia).

Submission + - Microsoft makes strides in government sector (interopnews.com)

Submitted by

willdavid

on Thursday October 11, 2007 @04:07PM

willdavid writes: "As government agencies continue to strive to operate more efficiently and offer improved services to taxpayers, they are turning with increasing frequency to Microsoft for technology and services that help them achieve their goals. To wit, a recent Federal Computer Week Government IT Buying Study finds that 91 percent of government organizations are using Microsoft software for enterprise and applications software. And another recent study, North American Government Application Software Adoption For 2007, Forrester Research, Inc., February 2007, finds that "Windows Server remains the primary OS for government," with 67 percent of "government application software decision-makers identifying Windows Server as the OS that they use to run their most important enterprise packaged applications." http://www.interopnews.com/news/microsoft-makes-strides-in-government-sector.html"

Submission + - Rain on Saturn's moon Titan -- But What Size?

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Thursday October 11, 2007 @03:59PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "Reuters article on researchers discovering that it rains methane on Mars.

What interested me is that the article quotes one of the scientists as follows:

"The question is, is it liquid methane that is sitting in a cloud, or is it falling through the sky," Adamkovics said in a telephone interview. His hunch is that it is falling, given the massive size of these raindrops, which Adamkovics believes are about 1,000 times bigger than rain on Earth. "Because there is a bit less gravity and the atmosphere is thicker on Titan, the rain drops and the cloud drops are really big," he said. Whereas raindrops on Earth are micrometer sized, he said on Titan they appear to be a millimeter or bigger in size. "The droplet gets so big it can't hold itself together anymore," Adamkovics said.
I've always heard that raindrops on Earth were from .5 mm up to around 4 mm in diameter (the latter when there's a lot of turbulence and the droplets collide to form bigger and bigger drops). So what gives here?"

Submission + - New British law to prosecute lying politicians (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

Ian Dykes

on Thursday October 11, 2007 @03:59PM

Ian Dykes writes: "The Ministry of Truth began life as a single question: if a Member of Parliament lies, how do I hold them to account? The shocking answer, according to the makers of this new documentary, is: you can't.

If a politician lies to the electorate, there is no formal course of legal redress outside a general election. In a bid to close this gap in the constitution, an MP has drafted The Misrepresentation of the People Act: a bill that would force politicians to tell the truth — or face criminal prosecution.

Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price is now spearheading a national campaign to change British law so that any politician who deliberately misleads the electorate can be prosecuted"

Submission + - In Case of Death, Disclose Passwords

Submitted by cdoggyd on Thursday October 11, 2007 @03:58PM

cdoggyd writes: Last year, a man, who kept his address book strictly online, died without telling anyone his passwords. This caused problems for his daughter when she tried to notify his contacts. I remember discussion of a "death clock" system that required user interaction at specific intervals to prevent it from disclosing information like passwords. This would have solved the problem for Mr. Talcott's daughter. Does anyone have the actual name and additional information on this system?

Submission + - What does it take to hire and keep tech talent (networkworld.com)

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Thursday October 11, 2007 @03:43PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "The Society for Information Management (SIM) this week saidthat "Attracting, developing and retaining IT professionals" topped its annual list of IT management concerns, ahead of financial woes related to reducing costs and technology-related worries such as security and privacy. SIM reports that IT managers are experiencing staff turnover rates of less than 10% this year, which is far lower than years past, and that attracting talent worries most because of a dwindling resource pool. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/101107-what-does-it-take.html"

Submission + - China jails woman for posing as rape victim (cnn.com)

Submitted by

hackingbear

on Thursday October 11, 2007 @03:43PM

hackingbear writes: "CNN reports that Police in central China have jailed a 50-year-old woman for posing as a teenage rape victim on the Internet

"She fabricated rumors and mislead the public," said Wang Bing, an official with the propaganda department of the Tianqiao District Public Security Bureau in Jinan city.

Chen was detained Sunday and would be held for ten days though she has not been charged with any crime, Wang said. "We're discussing further punishment, maybe re-education through labor," he said.

"Some warmhearted netizens posted details of Little Raindrop's story to the big Internet forums where it became a hot topic and got more than 300,000 hits," Jinan's local Qi Lu Evening News reported on its Web site.
Do we have rights to post as an non-existent figure in the US? What if it causes public disturbance?"

Submission + - Smoke and Mirrors in Automotive SEO (promotionworld.com)

Submitted by

DiffeeOnline

on Thursday October 11, 2007 @03:31PM

DiffeeOnline writes: "Doing search engine optimization for auto dealers is difficult, as the market is extremely competitive. Selling search engine optimization to car dealers makes doing the SEO seem like childsplay. Since the beginning of the world wide web, the automotive industry, car dealers in particular, have been a year or two behind the trends. Whether it is their reluctance to let go of the "glory days" in the 80's and early 90's or simply a lack of time to devote to understanding the technology, car dealers seem to be the last to know when it comes to the internet. Smoke and Mirrors in Automotive SEO"

Submission + - Swiss to employ quantum cryptography in elections (nanowerk.com)

Submitted by hakaii on Thursday October 11, 2007 @03:10PM

hakaii writes: he Swiss national elections on October 21 will mark a world first for Geneva as the canton employs quantum cryptography to protect the dedicated line used for counting its ballots. This unbreakable data code was conceived by the University of Geneva and developed industrially by its spin-off, id Quantique. This project is the first real-world application of quantum cryptography.

Submission + - Nepomuk: Semantic Desktop & Collaborative Proj (xwiki.com)

Submitted by

Rick Kenney

on Thursday October 11, 2007 @02:41PM

Rick Kenney writes: "Through a two year agreement with EDGE-IT (a Mandriva company) and XWiki, NEPOMUK seeks to bring together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment. The goal of Nepomuk is to create a personal semantic desktop with social and semantic features. Social features meaning participants will be able to create a social network between each other or to harness existing connections that they have established through other sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn. Semantic features will mean users sharing a common vocabulary for describing as accurately as possible the issues they come across and the answers they bring, so that the search engine will return very accurate answers. This will also allow users to draw relations between any and all desktop objects such as events, contacts, bookmarks, tasks, files etc. The API is being implemented both in Java and in C++ (the C++ version is included in the upcoming KDE4 release)."

Submission + - Another step towards open source for Microsoft (itbusinessedge.com)

Submitted by

willdavid

on Thursday October 11, 2007 @02:38PM

willdavid writes: "About Rob Enerle's article in IT Business Edge — Another step towards open source: Bill Hilf becomes Microsoft's GM of Server Strategy: Watching Microsoft deal with open source's popularity kind of mirrors the Five Steps of Grief, normally applied when someone faces a terrible loss. Those steps are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. We saw all of the stages initially: Microsoft blew off open source efforts; executives got mad and called it names; we had sites like "Get the Facts," which seemed to be a way to bargain out; depression was likely behind the lack of execution and some of the commentary in unauthorized internal Microsoft blog entries; and now Microsoft has reached acceptance, putting its lead open source guy in charge of server strategy. http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/rob/?p=155"

Submission + - Orion Nebula Gets New Milepost Marker, Now Closer

Submitted by twilight30 on Thursday October 11, 2007 @02:31PM

twilight30 writes: Discovery News is reporting that 'One of the most famous and scrutinized heavenly objects is 10 to 20 percent closer than we thought, say two teams of radio astronomers who have made some of the most precise cosmic distance measurements ever, with a telescope nearly as big as Earth. The Orion Nebula is the closest major stellar nursery to Earth, so it has been heavily studied to learn about the lives of stars. Its distance from Earth, however, has long been a matter of uncertainty, with an estimate made about 25 years ago in need of revision.'

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