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Comment Re:Oracle will do just fine (Score 3, Insightful) 154

Nonsense. I work for a fairly large university in the NE. We were an virtually exclusive Sun hardware/Solaris shop. Due to Oracle's behavior, we've moved wholly away on both hardware and software since they acquired Sun. Good riddance. I also know of an enormous urban school district (where I used to work and still know many people) that has done the same. While this is only an N of 2, I doubt we're all that rare.

I work for a University out west, and our story is the same as yours. We had a large Sun/Solaris presense... not anymore.

Comment kfreebsd kernel too (Score 2) 283

by aodash (#34581308) Attached to: Debian 6.0 To Feature a Completely Free Kernel
Not just Linux, they yanked it out of the kfreebsd kernel too, which is causing problems because you can't just install a firmware-kfreebsd package - yet. I think they were a bit premature pulling the trigger on the kfreebsd kernel. Check out: http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd/2010/12/msg00046.html and http://bugs.debian.org//cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=594940
Math

Why Computers Suck At Math 626

Posted by Soulskill from the must-be-lit-majors dept.
antdude writes "This TechRadar article explains why computers suck at math, and how simple calculations can be a matter of life and death, like in the case of a Patriot defense system failing to take down a Scud missile attack: 'The calculation of where to look for confirmation of an incoming missile requires knowledge of the system time, which is stored as the number of 0.1-second ticks since the system was started up. Unfortunately, 0.1 seconds cannot be expressed accurately as a binary number, so when it's shoehorned into a 24-bit register — as used in the Patriot system — it's out by a tiny amount. But all these tiny amounts add up. At the time of the missile attack, the system had been running for about 100 hours, or 3,600,000 ticks to be more specific. Multiplying this count by the tiny error led to a total error of 0.3433 seconds, during which time the Scud missile would cover 687m. The radar looked in the wrong place to receive a confirmation and saw no target. Accordingly no missile was launched to intercept the incoming Scud — and 28 people paid with their lives.'"
Mozilla

Mozilla Releases SeaMonkey 2.0 185

Posted by timothy from the little-people-in-fishbowls dept.
binarybum writes "Often forgotten, but the independent open source spirit lives strong in the once Mozilla project — now SeaMonkey. Version 2.0 is finally out and rivals Firefox with similar features but integrated email with a small footprint." The Register has a short piece on the 2.0 release, which mentions that SeaMonkey is now based on Firefox 3.5.4. Stephen Shankland lists some of the features in a handy bullet-point style, too. I'm using the new release right now; it's crashed once — but only once — in several hours of use.

Comment Re:Opera Mini != spyware ? (Score 1) 110

by aodash (#17044486) Attached to: Opera Mini 3.0 Now Available
Fair enough - I had forget that the primary market for Opera Mini is cell phones (I don't even browse the web on mine) and not the Wi-Fi enabled PDA I was testing it on. As such I didn't see the point of proxying the connection, especially when I may or may not trust who is proxying it.

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