Comment Re:oh jeez (Score 1) 250
IBM sells z/OS which is a closed source OS with a restrictive license that says you can only run it on an IBM zMachine.
Are you telling me that I can not run the MS Office I legally bought on WINE under linux?
Comment Re:Hey Don Quixote, put down the lance (Score 0, Troll) 250
There are people who think as you do, and support you. We are just not so vocal as the feeble minded /.ers here.
Comment Re:Not free, however (Score 3, Informative) 131
All the linux distributions I have used so far (SuSE, Mandriva, PCLInuxos, Ubuntu), all, have Numpy in their ready made packages. All you have to do is click to install it. To install SciPy, you download it, and run as installer. I don't know about matplotlib, but I suspect it as easy as SciPy.
Thus, they are free.
But if you want to fund python related staff, then fine.
Thus, they are free.
But if you want to fund python related staff, then fine.
Astronomers Solve the Mystery of 'Hanny's Voorwerp' 123
KentuckyFC writes "In 2007, a Dutch school teacher named Hanny van Arkel discovered a huge blob of green-glowing gas while combing though images to classify galaxies. Hanny's Voorwerp (meaning Hanny's object in Dutch) is astounding because astronomers have never seen anything like it. Although galactic in scale, it is clearly not a galaxy because it does not contain any stars. That raises an obvious question: what is causing the gas to glow? Now a new survey of the region of sky seems to have solved the problem. The Voorwerp lies close to a spiral galaxy which astronomers now say hides a massive black hole at its center. The infall of matter into the black hole generates a cone of radiation emitted in a specific direction. The great cloud of gas that is Hanny's Voorwerp just happens to be in the firing line, ionizing the gas and causing it to glow green. That lays to rest an earlier theory that the cloud was reflecting an echo of light from a short galactic flare up that occurred 10,000 years ago. It also explains why Voorwerps are so rare: these radiation cones are highly directional so only occasionally do unlucky gas clouds get caught in the crossfire."
Best OSS CFD Package For High School Physics? 105
RobHart writes "I am teaching a 'physics of flight' unit to grade 11 Physics students. Part of the unit will have the students running tests on several aerofoils in a wind tunnel. I also want to expose them to a Computational Fluid Dynamics package which will allow them to contrast experimental results with those produced by the CFD package. There are a number of open source CFDs available (Windows- or Linux-based are both fine), but I don't have much time to evaluate which are the simplest to use in terms of setting up the mesh, initial conditions, etc. — a very important issue as students do not have much time in this unit." Can anyone offer insight about ease of use for programs in this niche?
Comment Re:Oh good! The trolls are out in full force! (Score 1) 702
fascist control freaks worse than Microsoft.
I thought I would never hear that something is worse that Microsoft. Sadly, I agree.
Comment Re:Why is it not a phone? (Score 1) 702
By exactly the same logic, one can argue that it is a computer.
Alberta Scientists Discover Largest-Ever Cache of Dinosaur Bones 154
Cryolithic writes "The largest cache of dinosaur bones ever found has been unearthed in Alberta. From the article: '... officials at the Royal Tyrrell Museum say the Hilda site provides the first solid evidence that some horned dinosaur herds were much larger than previously thought, with numbers comfortably in the high hundreds to low thousands. ... Rather than picturing the animals as drowning while crossing a river, a classic scenario that has been used to explain bonebed occurrences at many sites in Alberta, the research team interpreted the vast coastal landscape as being submerged during tropical storms or hurricanes. With no high ground to escape to, most of the members of the herd drowned in the rising coastal waters. Carcasses were deposited in clumps across kilometers of ancient landscape as floodwaters receded.'"
A Quick Look At KDE SC 4.5 Beta 1 122
dmbkiwi writes "The latest in the 4.x series of the KDE Software Compilation is due to be released in early August 2010. With the first beta of this release recently unleashed, I thought I'd download the openSuse packages and see what 4.5's got in store for us."
Comment Way forward? (Score 1) 1213
The way forward is Linux.
Comment Re:Back to the original subject... (Score 3, Funny) 1213
I work at a company that every reader of slashdot would know, and we are still using XP
You, Sir, work for Microsoft, don't you?
New Handheld Computer Is 100% Open Source 195
metasonix writes "While the rest of the industry has been babbling on about the iPad and imitations thereof, Qi Hardware is actually shipping a product that is completely open source and copyleft. Linux News reviews the Ben NanoNote (product page), a handheld computer apparently containing no proprietary technology. It uses a 366 MHz MIPS processor, 32MB RAM, 2 GB flash, a 320x240-pixel color display, and a Qwerty keyboard. No network is built in, though it is said to accept SD-card Wi-Fi or USB Ethernet adapters. Included is a very simple Linux OS based on the OpenWrt distro installed in Linksys routers, with Busybox GUI. It's apparently intended primarily for hardware and software hackers, not as a general-audience handheld. The price is right, though: $99."
Comment Re:Seems odd... (Score 1) 546
The real question is how do you compile the OS on the platform.
Comment Retirement (Score 1) 409
How about, when I retire?
Comment Re:Not really, no (Score 1) 374
You could argue that one difference is that Visual Studio is available to anyone prepared to pay for it.
You may be right, as the poster does not give any details. However, if we are to believe the poster, the build scripts, which in the case of VS would be the project files, are not given, and this _is_ a violation of the GPL.
