Comment Re:Spock... (Score 1) 411
The reason lots of us came to study engineering too.
Comment Re:Does TV count? (Score 1) 449
Yes.. as a kid I kind of used to rationalize that gasoline should be the most powerfull explosive known to mankind, capable of blowing up by itself if you agitate a container full of it fast enough. When I first lerned that you needed other componets (like oxigen) mixed in a precise proportiont o make gasoline violently explosive, well... I was already ruined. Lets say I like my TV & Movie's falling cars explosive.
Comment Re:Pointing at someone else's problems... (Score 1) 142
So they aren't? Why?, this site has journals you know. Slashdot is the only social network you need. What do you need pictures for?
Comment Re:Pointing at someone else's problems... (Score 1) 142
Nice trolling attempt but I think mr. Cmdr To hit Armor Class 0 is quiting cold turkey for the moment.
Comment Re:IBM did the same (Score 3, Interesting) 394
About 10 years ago a couple of Alpha servers (Tru64 Unix) and EMA storage in a cluster arrangement was as fast and as stable you can get below the mainframe category (thanks to DEC VAX multiprocessor and shared memory technologies). The natural evolution of the alphas never came out of HP because of their infatuation with Intel Itanium processors, and see how that affair ended up.
Red Hat Settles Patent Case 76
darthcamaro writes "Red Hat has settled another patent case with patent holding firm Acacia. This time the patent is US Patent #6,163,776, 'System and method for exchanging data and commands between an object oriented system and relational system.' While it's great that Red Hat has ended this particular patent threat, it's not yet clear how they've settled this case. The last time Red Hat tangled with Acacia they won in an Texas jury trial. 'Red Hat routinely addresses attempts to impede the innovative forces of open source via allegations of patent infringement,' Red Hat said in a statement. 'We can confirm that Red Hat, Inc and Software Tree LLC have settled patent litigation that was pending in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas.'"
White House Correspondent Tweets His Heart Attack 77
Tommy Christopher, who writes for mediate.com, has reporting in his blood, so much so that he livetweeted every part of his recent heart attack. "I gotta be me. Livetweeting my heart attack. Beat that!" and "This is not like the movies. Most deadpan heart attack evar. Still hurts even after the morphine," were among his updates as he was rushed to the hospital. Christopher is now in stable condition after recovering from emergency surgery.
Comment Re:Usenet and IRC were like that too (Score 1) 161
IRC was cool when it was community based. For me it was like a real-time facebook, a facebook with weakly new random friends. I still maintain contact with people I meet in some geographically-based channels that eventually bacame meatspace friends. When it went sour? I think right after the chat networks like aim,msm,etc became mainstream, it denied IRC comumnities with new users so the communities eventually died.
Comment Re:Let me get this straight (Score 0) 123
Not
Rumor of Betelgeuse's Death Greatly Exaggerated 356
The Bad Astronomer writes "A rumor is spreading on the Net like wildfire that the red supergiant star Betelgeuse is about to explode in a supernova. This rumor is almost certainly not true. First, it's posted on a doomsday forum. Second, it's three times removed from the source, and is anonymous at each step. Third, the evidence is shaky at best. Plus, even if true, the supernova is too far away to hurt us. But other than that ..."
Open Source Developer Knighted 101
unixfan writes "Georg Greve, developer of Open Document Format and active FOSS developer, has received a knighthood in Germany for his work. From the article: 'Some weeks ago I received news that the embassy in Berne had unsuccessfully been trying to contact me under FSFE's old office address in Zurich. This was a bit odd and unexpected. So you can probably understand my surprise to be told by the embassy upon contacting them that on 18 December 2009 I had been awarded the Cross of Merit on ribbon (Verdienstkreuz am Bande) by the Federal Republic of Germany. As you might expect, my first reaction was one of disbelief. I was, in fact, rather shaken. You could also say shocked. Quick Wikipedia research revealed this to be part of the orders of knighthood, making this a Knight's Cross.'"
Ubuntu Will Switch To Base-10 File Size Units In Future Release 984
CyberDragon777 writes "Ubuntu's future 10.10 operating system is going to make a small, but contentious change to how file sizes are represented. Like most other operating systems using binary prefixes, Ubuntu currently represents 1 kB (kilobyte) as 1024 bytes (base-2). But starting with 10.10, a switch to SI prefixes (base-10) will denote 1 kB as 1000 bytes, 1 MB as 1000 kB, 1 GB as 1000 MB, and so on."
Comment Re:Inflamatory headling superceeds mundane content (Score 5, Informative) 268
We have announced that our upcoming Mono release (2.8) will default to 4.0:
http://www.mono-project.com/Roadmap
For the first time in Mono's history our C# compiler and its supporting engine and core libraries were done before Microsoft released the product, we were usually one to two years behind. This time we are some five months ahead of time:
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Dec-09.html
There are still a handful of loose ends here and there, but luckily, nothing major.
Comment Re:O rly. (Score 3, Insightful) 425
.NET was released in July of 2000.
And Google uses a mix of languages and tools: different features require different tools and all that. Had there been no legal problems, it would have been a no-brainer to use
It did not have to be Mono, it could have been a third party
Comment Re:So, Miguel (Score 4, Informative) 425
Rather, submit patches to replace System.Data with Sqlite-net and you have protection from Microsoft patents on
