mrgrey - Slashdot User

Submission + - iXsystems Announces Merger with FreeBSD Mall, Inc.

Submitted by

roland

on Thursday March 01, 2007 @05:36AM

roland writes: "iXsystems Announces Acquisition of FreeBSD Mall For Immediate Release: San Jose, February 26, 2007 Historic Merger of Enterprise-Class Hardware Solution Provider and FreeBSD Software Distributor and Support Provider iXsystems, Inc., an enterprise-class hardware solution provider and corporate sponsor of PC-BSD, announced today its acquisition of FreeBSD Mall, Inc., a provider of high quality FreeBSD software, literature, support, and services. FreeBSD Mall publishes affordable versions of FreeBSD source code on CD and DVD as well as FreeBSD handbooks and toolkits. FreeBSD Mall is also a key supporter of the FreeBSD community, providing donation assistance to the FreeBSD Project and the FreeBSD Foundation, as well as sponsoring the participation of key FreeBSD developers at various technical conferences. iXsystems' acquisition of FreeBSD Mall will begin to consolidate various entities supporting FreeBSD under one umbrella. This consolidation will promote further awareness of FreeBSD, the open source operating system of choice for many corporate system administrators. "The acquisition of FreeBSD Mall by iXsystems creates a resource rich environment for the FreeBSD community to find products, support, and technical services", states Michael Lauth, President and CEO of iXsystems. "Our vision is to have a professional company supporting the FreeBSD community at every level." "This acquisition is great news for FreeBSD Mall because it gives us greater access to resources that will enable us to enhance our product line and offerings", said Theresa Garner, General Manager, FreeBSD Mall. "I am especially excited about expanding our support services for FreeBSD by joining with the iXsystems professional support team to offer a superior customer experience." "This union creates a larger public presence for the advocacy and adoption of FreeBSD," said Murray Stokely, VP of Engineering, FreeBSD Mall and Core Team member of the FreeBSD Project. "The FreeBSD community is expanding daily and having a company like iXsystems fully committed to the distribution of FreeBSD and offering professional services will make the project stronger." About iXsystems iXsystems, Inc. is a leading provider of high-performance computing clusters, blade servers, rackmount servers, and storage solutions to the global marketplace. iXsystems supplies FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux servers to a wide cross-section of industries. iXsystems also supports and maintains the PC-BSD project. The company is headquartered in San Jose, CA. For more information: Denise Ebery, iXsystems Phone: (408)943-4100 Vist the website: www.iXsystems.com Send an email: info@iXsystems.com"

Submission + - Is Apple about to unveil multitouch displays?

Submitted by Virtual_Raider on Thursday March 01, 2007 @05:25AM

Virtual_Raider writes: Engadget is echoing a piece of "wild speculation" from this blog about the upcoming Leopard. Is it possible that the company is about to unveil multitouch displays in their computer line in sync with the iPhone's innovative screen?

Submission + - How to turn your iPod mini into a flash based iPod

Submitted by

mistermark

on Thursday March 01, 2007 @05:23AM

mistermark writes: "In this little proof-of-concept I was eager to try out if I could swap the Microdrive inside an iPod mini for a Compact Flash-card. These cards are getting bigger and cheaper by the day so my idea was, if this works out, we have a great way of extending the life of this little MP3-player..."

Submission + - Microsoft investing in new copy protection

Submitted by daniel_howell on Thursday March 01, 2007 @05:22AM

daniel_howell writes: According to this article, Microsoft is in investing in a different approach to copy protection. The technology in questions imprints a file with a combination of a "watermark" and a "fingerprint", identifying who bought the music (or video or whatever) and who has the rights to use it. I guess the eventual idea is to combine it with web-crawling technology such as the prototype in this story, and then go after file sharers directly.

It all sounds a bit Big Brother — but it has to better than selling me something that doesn't let me play the file where I want. And it is in line with most copy protection laws around the world, not just the USA.

Submission + - Xbox 360 lacks precautions measures to prevent scr

Submitted by

janp

on Thursday March 01, 2007 @04:55AM

janp writes: "The Dutch TV program Kassa asked Hardware.Info to investigate the complaints of many Xbox 360 owners that their console scratches their gamediscs and renders them useless. Although they couldn't reproduce the problem completely, Hardware.Info did find out that the Xbox lacks some precaution measures that prevents the lens from scratching discs: where many PC DVD-drives have a sort of cushions around the lens that prevent scratching, the Xbox 360 drive doesn't provide any safety measures whatsoever. Kassa received hundreds of complaints and is now preparing a legal claim against Microsoft."

Submission + - AMD demonstrates "Teraflop in a box"

Submitted by UncleFluffy on Thursday March 01, 2007 @04:04AM

UncleFluffy writes: AMD gave a sneak preview of their upcoming R600 GPU today. The demo system was a single PC with two R600 cards running streaming computing tasks at just over 1 Teraflop. This beats Intel to ubiquitous Teraflop machines by approximately 5 years.

Getting Out of Tech Support? 152

Posted by Cliff on Thursday March 01, 2007 @03:45AM from the leaving-a-dead-end-career dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "For the last year or so I've been working in 1st line tech support at a small call centre that's part of a much larger outsourcing company and to be honest it's sucking the life out of me, I want change but I don't know what direction to take in order to get out and I really need some advice from others who have made the jump. I suppose what I'd like to know is what kind of jobs one should be looking for coming from technical support with decent knowledge of UNIX, networking, scripting and 'light coding'. Is there any hope for me or will I have to go back to school in order to even have employers look at my resume?"

New Technique for Recycling PCBs 77

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday March 01, 2007 @03:21AM from the use-and-use-again dept.

MattSparkes writes "PCBs from discarded computers, cellphones and other devices could be recycled less harmfully using a technique developed by researchers in China. Unlike current methods, it can be used to reclaim metals such as copper without releasing toxic fumes into the air. Only a small numbers of PCBs are currently recycled."

Submission + - WiFi a DirectTV Antenna

Submitted by

QuantumCrypto

on Thursday March 01, 2007 @01:51AM

QuantumCrypto writes: "I always wonder what people do with their DirectTV dish antennas when they no subscribe for service. Of course, they WiFi it! This project converts a DirectTV dish into a high performance wireless network antenna. Perhaps if enough ex-DirectTV subscribers got together, the world might be a better place to link up."

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