PavelP - Slashdot User

Roland Piquepaille Dies 288

Posted by kdawson on Friday January 09, 2009 @02:33PM from the in-memoriam dept.

overheardinpdx writes "I'm sad to report that longtime HPC technology pundit Roland Piquepaille (rpiquepa) died this past Tuesday. Many of you may know of him through his blog, his submissions to Slashdot, and his many years of software visualization work at SGI and Cray Research. I worked with Roland 20 years ago at Cray, where we both wrote tech stories for the company newsletter. With his focus on how new technologies modify our way of life, Roland was really doing Slashdot-type reporting before there was a World Wide Web. Rest in peace, Roland. You will be missed." The notice of Roland's passing was posted on the Cray Research alumni group on Linked-In by Matthias Fouquet-Lapar. There will be a ceremony on Monday Jan. 12, at 10:30 am Paris time, at Père Lachaise.

Next G8 President Wants To "Regulate the Internet" 279

Posted by kdawson on Thursday December 04, 2008 @07:38PM from the good-luck-with-that dept.

antispam_ben writes "The President of Italy, which will have the Presidency of the G8 starting January 1, says he wants to use the future position of Italy to 'Regulate the Internet.' Italy's President Berlusconi appears to be a cantankerous character, prompting riots when Italy last had the G8 presidency in 2001. This will no doubt be a serious effort, but knowing the fundamental design of the Internet involves routing around damage, the efforts could be more amusing than threatening." Update — 12/5 at 00:04 by SS: Reader fondacio noted that Silvio Berlusconi is Italy's Prime Minister, not its President. He is Italy's G8 representative, and Italy will hold the presidency in 2009.

Sun Releases JavaFX 185

Posted by timothy on Thursday December 04, 2008 @06:50PM from the does-it-roll-off-the-tongue-or-not dept.

ink writes "Sun released JavaFX 1.0 today, in a bid to take on Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight technologies. It is Sun's first Java release to include standardized, cross-platform audio and video playback code (in the form of On2 licensed codecs). The lack of a Linux or Solaris release is a notable absence. The development kit currently consists of the base run-time, a NetBeans/Eclipse plug-in and a set of artifact exporters for Adobe CS 3&4." An anonymous reader adds a link to several tutorials accompanying the new release.

AIX On the Desktop Is Getting the Boot 366

Posted by timothy on Tuesday November 18, 2008 @12:56PM from the caravan-moving-on dept.

flnca writes "Today, I was playing with the thought again to purchase an AIX workstation one day when I can afford them, and I was surprised to see that IBM is going to give its IntelliStation POWER Series workstations the boot in January '09. A black day for AIX on the desktop. I really wonder what's the problem there, warehouse costs? IBM has a history of burying its best stuff (like OS/2 for instance). Some years ago, I enjoyed hacking away on an RS/6000 workstation running AIX 4.2, and it was a pure joy. Not only the kernel, but also the admin tools, like smit and smitty. Their blade-centric solution uses Windows as a client for workstation application. This truly sounds like IBM wants AIX only for servers anymore. I'm not amused. Although, eXceed on Windows with an XDCMP server running on AIX might also be a viable solution ... whatever. But it can't beat a native POWER box sitting on your desk, that's for sure."

Comment Obliged? Certainly NOT (Score 1) 272

by PavelP on Thursday November 13, 2008 @01:07PM (#25748505) Attached to: How Long Should an Open Source Project Support Users?

Is an open source project obliged to provide support for its users?

Certainly NOT. From GPLv2:

no warranty
11. because the program is licensed free of charge, there is no warranty for the program, to the extent permitted by applicable law. except when otherwise stated in writing the copyright holders and/or other parties provide the program "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. the entire risk as to the quality and performance of the program is with you. should the program prove defective, you assume the cost of all necessary servicing, repair or correction.

The rest is all about goodwill of developers and active users. That means you.

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