Comment Re:Freedom of assembly (Score 1) 630
Not all protesters were destructive. In fact, my impression is that a majority were peacful:
http://pittsburghpolice.net/
Comment which distro? (Score 1) 835
Had I been your school's IT policy planner, I would give the same answer I give to employees at the software company where I work: "We support Windows XP, OS X, Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSolaris". The "Linux" title covers so many idiosyncratic distros that we can't reasonably offer to support them all. Many such distros are poorly documented/tested, to make matters worse for a support team.
Comment Re:Good for routers? (Score 1) 280
This is just off the top of my head. Is there something special about SPARC that would make it remarkably good at some specific application that Oracle uses?
Something that a lot of people don't realize (or forget) about SPARC is that the new chips (T1 and T2 series) excel at concurrency - lots of requests getting serviced at once. This happens to be something that a database needs, too. So I'd say owning SPARC (the 'source' of which was actually open-sourced!) is a pretty good thing for Oracle.
I'm more interested to see how Oracle re-brands (or doesn't) the Sun product line.
FWIW, Sun and Intel engineers have had an excellent working relationship for the past few years, so I don't think keeping SPARC necessarily means trying to fight Intel.
Comment Re:slashdvertisements (Score 1) 195
My impression from reading news reports was that Sun was actively seeking a buyer, which is a little different than a takeover.
Sun is really good at engineering. IBM is really good at making money from engineers' work. Sounds like a good reason to get together to me. IBM likes to have a stable of awesome tech to sell, and Sun needs management that can monetize that.
Comment Re:That's great... (Score 1) 38
I'm posting this from OpenSolaris with a ZFS boot disk, running on a 32-bit ThinkPad T43 :)
Top Apple Rumors, Bricks, Low Price, NVIDIA 283
Vigile writes "With the news that Apple will be releasing new MacBook products on October 14th, speculation has begun on what exactly those new products will be. Tips of a manufacturing process involving lasers and a single 'brick' of aluminum are catching on, as is the idea of a sub-$1000 netbook-type device. More interesting might be the persistent rumors of an NVIDIA chipset adoption that would drastically increase gaming ability, allow MacBooks to improve their support for OpenCL and take advantage of the new Adobe CS4 software with GPU acceleration. Will NVIDIA's ailing chipset business get a shot in the arm next week?"
World Bank Under Cybersiege In "Unprecedented Crisis" 377
JagsLive sends in a Fox News report on large-scale and possibly ongoing security breaches at the World Bank. "The World Bank Group's computer network — one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation — has been raided repeatedly by outsiders for more than a year, FOX News has learned. It is still not known how much information was stolen. But sources inside the bank confirm that servers in the institution's highly-restricted treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software last April. Invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank's network for nearly a month in June and July. In total, at least six major intrusions — two of them using the same group of IP addresses originating from China — have been detected at the World Bank since the summer of 2007, with the most recent breach occurring just last month. In a frantic midnight e-mail to colleagues, the bank's senior technology manager referred to the situation as an 'unprecedented crisis.' In fact, it may be the worst security breach ever at a global financial institution. And it has left bank officials scrambling to try to understand the nature of the year-long cyber-assault, while also trying to keep the news from leaking to the public." Update: 10/11 01:15 GMT by T : Massive spyware infestations might be good cause to reevaluate the TCO of non-Windows systems on the desktop.
Wikimedia Simplifies By Moving To Ubuntu 215
David Gerard writes "Wikimedia, the organization that runs Wikipedia and associated sites, has moved its server infrastructure entirely to Ubuntu 8.04 from a hodge-podge of Ubuntu, Red Hat, and various Fedora versions. 400 servers were involved and the project has been going on for 2 years. (There's also a small amount of OpenSolaris on the backend. All open source!)"
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