barking_at_airplanes - Slashdot User

Submission + - Sam Ramji, Microsoft's Open Source Guru Moving On (typepad.com)

Submitted by

barking_at_airplanes

on Saturday September 12, 2009 @05:16AM

barking_at_airplanes writes: "Some called him crazy 3-1/2 years ago when he joined Microsoft to run the Open Source Software Lab but he endured and made real differences to how Microsoft treats Open Source and how open source people now view Microsoft. Sam Ramji is now heading back to Silicon Valley to join a Cloud Computing startup. Sam comments in his announcement:
46 months later, I am amazed at the changes that have occurred for the company, for the team I belonged to, and the sentiments of the industry.
It's a statement that 46 months ago few Slashdotters would have thought could come true! With Sam leaving, can Microsoft's positive momentum into Open Source continue successfully?"

Submission + - Google Getting Into Solar Mirror Business 1

Submitted by

adeelarshad82

on Saturday September 12, 2009 @04:31AM

adeelarshad82 writes: "Google is disappointed with the lack of breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector but the company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by a quarter or more. The company's engineers have been focused on solar thermal technology, in which the sun's energy is used to heat up a substance that produces steam to turn a turbine. Mirrors focus the sun's rays on the heated substance."

Bookmark Slashdot Your Rights Online Story | Geist On Copyright As Canada Consult Nears E (slashdot.org)

by wrecked on Saturday September 12, 2009 @03:59AM

Submission + - Microsoft: Windows 7 upgrade can take nearly a day 1

Submitted by Eugen on Friday September 11, 2009 @08:14PM

Eugen writes: Ars Technica: A Microsoft Software Engineer has posted the results of tests the company performed to the upgrade time of Windows 7. The metric used was total upgrade time across different user profiles (with different data set sizes and number of programs installed) and different hardware profiles. A clean 32-bit install on what Microsoft calls 'high-end hardware' should take only 30 minutes. In the worst case scenario, the process will take a bit 1220 minutes. That second extreme is not a typo: Microsoft really did time an upgrade that took 20 hours and 20 minutes. That's with 650GB of data, 40 applications, on mid-end hardware, and during a 32-bit upgrade. We don't even want to know how long it would take if Microsoft had bothered doing the same test with low-end hardware. The other interesting point worth noting is that the 32-bit upgrade is faster on a clean install than a 64-bit upgrade, regardless of the hardware configuration, and is faster on low-end hardware, regardless of the Data Profile. In the other six cases, the 64-bit upgrade is faster than the 32-bit ugprade.

Submission + - SPAM: IEEE stamps "approved" on 802.11n Wi-Fi standard

Submitted by

alphadogg

on Friday September 11, 2009 @05:28PM

alphadogg writes: "The IEEE has finally approved the 802.11n high-throughput wireless LAN standard. Bruce Kraemer, the long-time chairman of the 802.11n Task Group (part of the 802.11 Working Group, which oversees the WLAN standards), has sent out a notification [spam URL stripped] to a listserv for task group members, which includes a wide range of Wi-Fi chip makers, software developers, and equipment vendors."
Link to Original Source

Comment Re:SFU was only good for one thing (Score 1) 296

by barking_at_airplanes on Friday September 02, 2005 @04:08PM (#13466154) Attached to: Microsoft to Stop Releasing Services for Unix

What makes Cygwin better is the ample userland where wider and better supported range of 3rd party program packages built into the default install than SFU.

Now if pkgsrc fixes that issue, I might switch over more.

I expect you haven't visited The Interix Tools site then http://www.interopsystems.com/tools/. We use pkg_add (it's BSD based) for a load of additional utilities and libraries for Interix. These are binary packages BTW. So no futtzing with an builds. Packages include bash, openssh, zsh, BIND9, etc.

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