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Comment We eat our own (Score 4, Informative) 50

So, to the Red Hat employees reading this: thank you! Red Hat does great work for the world. We as a community also tend to undervalue a $1B/year publicly traded company with a large sales force out explaining to every potential enterprise customer that will listen the virtues of free software.

The Dev Suite thing is kinda cool. Not that I'd buy it :-), but interesting to know that option exists.

Comment Classic disruptive techonology problem (Score 5, Insightful) 309

Even though Kodak saw digital photography coming, the problem was Kodak's whole financial structure was tied to film, and digital technology was disruptive technology. They might have been able to sustain the brand by merging with or buying the right company at the right time (e.g. Canon), but most companies have a hard time dealing with technology shifts that vaporize their main profit center. It's not as simple as just knowing what the next trend is; it's figuring out how to gracefully wind down the existing cash cow while giving the new technology the management attention and resources it needs to thrive. Even then, there still ends up being a lot of pain because you can just put all of the same people you had producing film to work in a digital camera business.

Comment Webkit-based, too (and mod parent up) (Score 1) 182

Agreed, though I wouldn't go so far as to say that Google would be upset if Chrome marginalized Firefox through merit-based competition.

The main thing I would add is that it was only a matter of time before someone created a competitive Webkit-based browser for Windows, and there's no guarantee that whoever that was was going to be friendly to Google.

Patents

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.'"
Image

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 We had to pick a number (Score 1) 244

Hi there, I'm on the team that deployed Pending Changes. We picked 2000 rather arbitrarily, but it actually was a technical limitation driven by our need to limit possible load on the system rather than an editorial decision. Based on rough community consensus, it's actually in effect on far fewer articles as of this writing. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Pending_changes/Queue#Using_pending_changes for the community discussion of how and where to apply it.
Space

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 ..."

Comment Hydrogen leakage (Score 1) 326

From the Hydrogen economy article on Wikipedia:

There have also been some concerns over possible problems related to hydrogen gas leakage.[50] Molecular hydrogen leaks slowly from most containment vessels. It has been hypothesized that if significant amounts of hydrogen gas (H2) escape, hydrogen gas may, because of ultraviolet radiation, form free radicals (H) in the stratosphere. These free radicals would then be able to act as catalysts for ozone depletion. A large enough increase in stratospheric hydrogen from leaked H2 could exacerbate the depletion process. However, the effect of these leakage problems may not be significant. The amount of hydrogen that leaks today is much lower (by a factor of 10–100) than the estimated 10–20% figure conjectured by some researchers; for example, in Germany, the leakage rate is only 0.1% (less than the natural gas leak rate of 0.7%). At most, such leakage would likely be no more than 1–2% even with widespread hydrogen use, using present technology.[50]
...
[50] ^ a b "Assessing the Future Hydrogen Economy (letters)" (PDF). Science. 10 October 2003. Retrieved 2008-05-09.

The implication there is that even if leakage were a major problem, the gas doesn't escape the planet. Even if it did, and we switched entirely to hydrogen, and consumed 100 times the current rate of energy, I have a hard time believing we'd actually make a dent in the oceans. I'm going to guess that, by volume, the amount of oil that was ever on the planet is pretty trivial compared to the size of the oceans. Unlike what happens to oil when we burn it, most/all of the hydrogen would eventually be converted back into water.

Open Source

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.'"

Comment Re:Meh (Score 1) 572

If Mr. Sullivan needs [the fact that Jobs doesn't talk about the general problem with proprietary technology] explained to him then maybe he should hold his comments until he understands it. Does he actually expect *every* article, blog post or story to rehash this basic concept?

I think it's reasonable to expect an editorial that complains that Flash is "not open" as its first big bold bullet point would somehow address the reason why Jobs thinks we should care. I know why I care, but it's not at all clear why Jobs thinks I should care.

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