Comment Cultural Revolution 2.0 (Score 5, Insightful) 248
Great - the Cultural Revolution 2.0 - along with vigilantism, denouncements & public humiliation. Awesome, just what everyone needed; yay China. Sigh.
Comment They should be turned into allotments (Score 1) 806
In the UK, city councils have an obligation to provide land for allotments - garden plots - for their residents. These are always hugely oversubscribed and there are never enough to go around. They're an excellent idea, provide urban green spaces, allow people to grow their own fruit & veg and are a big net win all round. Why not do that with this reclaimed land?
What If Oracle Bought Sun Microsystems? 237
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister believes Oracle is next in line to make a play for Sun now that IBM has withdrawn its offer. Dismissing server market arguments in favor of Cisco or Dell as suitors, McAllister suggests that MySQL, ZFS, DTrace, and Java make Sun an even better asset to Oracle than to IBM. MySQL as a complement to Oracle's existing database business would make sense, given Oracle's 2005 purchase of Innobase, and with 'the long history of Oracle databases on Solaris servers, it might actually see owning Solaris as an asset,' McAllister writes. But the 'crown jewel' of the deal would be Java. 'It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of Java to Oracle. Java has become the backbone of Oracle's middleware strategy,' McAllister contends."
Google Tells Users To Drop IE6 426
Kelly writes "Google is now urging Gmail users to drop Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in favor of Firefox or Chrome. Google recently removed Firefox from the Google Pack bundle, replaced it with Chrome, then added a direct download link for Chrome on Google and YouTube. Google's decision to list IE6 as an unsupported Gmail browser does not affect just consumers: Tens of thousands of small- and mid-sized businesses that run Google Apps hosted services may dump IE6 as well. What's especially interesting is the fact that Mozilla is picking up two out of three browser users that Microsoft surrenders."
New Star Trek Trailer 591
roelbj writes "The full trailer to the next Star Trek movie is now available at the movie's official web site. The upcoming J.J. Abrams-helmed installment represents a changing of the guard, a reboot of the franchise, and a return to the original-series crew. It should prove interesting to see how Abrams' writing staff (Cloverfield, Lost, Alias) tackles the Star Trek universe and all the continuity and baggage that comes with it."
Comment A few questions that I would like answers to... (Score 1) 402
Getting WoW
Given that you can't play World of Warcraft at all without a monthly account, why do I have to buy the game on CD, in the shops? Why can't I just download the
This leads me to my next point...
Patching WoW
This is an extremely annoying and time consuming process. Quite often when logging on to WoW, I'm immediately kicked out so that it can download and install a patch. This can be anything from a few MB's to a few GB's. When this is done, I can log in again - only to be chucked out immediately so the next patch can download. Why doesn't blizzard use a repository-like system which just downloads the latest version in one go, rather than endless patches?
Speaking of which...
The blizzard downloader
Blizzard appear to be doing quite well, financially speaking, from $10 * 10 million subscribers a month. It would be nice if they would pony up a little bit of that for some bandwidth for patch downloading. I'm not expecting patches via ftp, but if the peer-to-peer is being slow, maybe blizard's http download stream in the downloader could help out a little bit more than ~20kbps?
Torrent
Also - why is the blizzard downloader only faux bittorrent? When you're using it, it only seems to talk to other Blizzard downloader clients, not bittorent clients in general. If you swipe the
Last one...
WoW is a very well behaved piece of windows software - you can run it from anywhere, you don't have to install it - you can just copy the folder. It's so well behaved that it even runs fine on Linux under Wine - this works out of the box for me with recent version of Linux, Wine & Wow. It's not perfect - but it's pretty good.
Bearing this in mind, it wouldn't seem like a big leap to suggest releasing a pre-packaged Linux version, bundling WoW+Wine into a
A native version would be very nice, but this would be better than the current situation, for many people.
What do you think?
CO2 To Fuel, Closing the "Carbon Loop" 316
leprasmurf writes "Inhabitat has posted an article detailing a recent announcement of a process to turn CO2 into fuel. The process, which used to be considered too energy inefficient, uses a multi-step, low pressure, and low temperature biocatalyst to break the CO2 into 'basic hydrocarbon building blocks.'"
Feed Newsforge: Lessons learned from open source Xara's failure (linux.com)
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