mdm42 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Clock of 10000 years (wired.com)

Submitted by

mdm42

on Saturday June 25, 2011 @10:13AM

mdm42 writes: "Jeff Bezos has seeded construction of a clock that he hopes will keep working for the next 10-thousand years. For Bezos the clock is a symbol of the power of long-term thinking. His hope is that building it will change the way humanity thinks about time, encouraging our distant descendants to take a longer view than we have. To make it all happen he's put in $42-million to get the ball rolling... or is that "pendulum swinging","

Submission + - Oracle shuttering OpenSSO (blogspot.com)

Submitted by mdm42 on Friday March 19, 2010 @09:48AM

mdm42 writes: OpenSSO is one of the best open source web Single Sign On projects out there. Sun Microsystems open-sourced OpenSSO in 2008, so it's sad to see how Oracle (after borging Sun) is shutting down this amazing open source project, labelling it "not strategic" and dismembering the few parts they think are worthwhile for their own SSO product.

They started by freezing the next express release, and during the last few weeks they have been removing all the open source downloads from OpenSSO website and removing content from the wiki.

Fortunately ForgeRock, a Norwegian company, has stepped up to the plate in an attempt to salvage the project under the new name OpenAM

Submission + - South African Gov. Open Source Progress

Submitted by

mdm42

on Saturday April 04, 2009 @02:21AM

mdm42 writes: "The South African government's State IT Agency (SITA) Free and Open Source Programme has released its second public newsletter outlining the progress of open source software in government. Among the range of issues covered are details of progress made in migration the SA Revenue Service over to open source software and progress in education.

The SA Revenue Service already uses Suse Linux extensively in its server infrastructure. SITA has recently launched a learner record tracking system for schools which is built using open source software."

Submission + - Microsoft Trolling on Google's Trademark? (itweb.co.za) 2

Submitted by mdm42 on Tuesday March 31, 2009 @03:54AM

mdm42 writes: According to local webnews site, ITWeb:
The Western Cape government and Microsoft this weekend opened the e-Googlethu Cape Access Centre, in Gugulethu, a township within Cape Town. The centre will supply the community with free access to 30 computers and the Internet.

Now IANAL, so forgive me for thinking that this is just trolling for a fight with Google. Fair enough, the name "e-Googlethu" is a neat enough pun on the name of the township, and I could possibly understand if the centre was a purely government project named by an ignorant bureaucrat, but with Microsoft's involvement, I have to wonder how Google's name got slipped into the mix. What do you suppose Microsoft is intending to achieve with this?

Submission + - Development Manager or Development Damager? (mikro2nd.net)

Submitted by mdm42 on Thursday June 19, 2008 @03:45AM

mdm42 writes: Since Open Letters to Management seem so flavour du jour, here's another. Developer accused of incompetence and/or unethical timekeeping by a manager who is not only completely clueless about software development process and norms, is not merely unwilling to learn, but expects the world to behave the way she wants whenever she waves her hands.

Not without good reason has she become known as The Princess!

Submission + - Over 10,000 malware sites hosted by IPowerWeb

Submitted by

mdm42

on Wednesday May 09, 2007 @11:52AM

mdm42 writes: "Ethan Zuckerman blogs that a friend's website, hosted with IPowerWeb, got hacked. Turns out that almost eleven-thousand websites hosted by IPowerWeb have also been hacked in the same manner, but IPowerWeb denies that they have a security problem. The crack injects malicious JavaScript into hosted web pages; the purpose of the JavaScript? To load Windows trojans onto client machines that access the websites.

To the rest of us it looks like their systems have been compromised from the ground up. Or perhaps an inside job...?"

Submission + - Google Opensource Project Hosting; End of SF Nigh?

Submitted by

mdm42

on Sunday February 18, 2007 @04:35AM

mdm42 writes: "Meandering about the 'net on a slow Sunday morning, I tripped across Google Code's latest addition — Project Hosting. The entry page is a typically Google-sparse "Search Projects", with the slogan "Release Early, Release Often" beneath it. The page for creating a new project only offers the 7 most-widely-accepted opensource licenses.

Seems to me that Google have moved squarely into Sourceforge's turf, here. Does this spell the end of sf.net? (Or am I just late to the party, here?)"

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