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Oracle

RIP, SunSolve 100

Posted by timothy from the to-the-moon-instead dept.
Kymermosst writes "Today marks the last day that SunSolve will be available. Oracle sent the final pre-deployment details today for the retirement of SunSolve and the transition to its replacement, My Oracle Support Release 5.2, which begins tomorrow. People who work with Sun's hardware and software have long used SunSolve as a central location for specifications, patches, and documentation."
Space

Pope's Astronomer Would Love To Baptize an Alien 308

Posted by samzenpus from the where-do-you-keep-the-head-on-this-thing? dept.
Ponca City, We Love You writes "The Guardian reports that Guy Consolmagno, curator of the pope's meteorite collection and a trained astronomer and planetary scientist, says he would be 'delighted' if intelligent life was found among the stars. 'But the odds of us finding it, of it being intelligent and us being able to communicate with it — when you add them up it's probably not a practical question.' Consolmagno adds that the traditional definition of a soul was to have intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions. 'Any entity — no matter how many tentacles it has — has a soul.' Would he baptize an alien? 'Only if they asked.' Consolmagno dismisses the ideas of intelligent design as a pseudo-scientific version of creationism. 'The word has been hijacked by a narrow group of creationist fundamentalists in America to mean something it didn't originally mean at all. It's another form of the God of the gaps. It's bad theology in that it turns God once again into the pagan god of thunder and lightning.'"
Space

Astronomers Discover 33 Pairs of Waltzing Black Holes 101

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the teach-them-to-foxtrot dept.
Astronomers from UC Berkeley have identified 33 pairs of waltzing black holes, closing the gap somewhat between the observed population of super-massive black hole pairs and what had been predicted by theory. "Astronomical observations have shown that 1) nearly every galaxy has a central super-massive black hole (with a mass of a million to a billion times the mass of the Sun), and 2) galaxies commonly collide and merge to form new, more massive galaxies. As a consequence of these two observations, a merger between two galaxies should bring two super-massive black holes to the new, more massive galaxy formed from the merger. The two black holes gradually in-spiral toward the center of this galaxy, engaging in a gravitational tug-of-war with the surrounding stars. The result is a black hole dance, choreographed by Newton himself. Such a dance is expected to occur in our own Milky Way Galaxy in about 3 billion years, when it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy."
Image

Pigeon Turns Out To Be Faster Than S. African Net 406

Posted by samzenpus from the fast-and-pigeon-fast dept.
inject_hotmail.com writes "The results are in: it's faster to send your data via an airborne carrier than it is through the pipes. As discussed Tuesday, a company in South Africa called Unlimited IT, frustrated by terribly slow Internet speeds, decided to prove their point by sending an actual homing pigeon with a "data card" strapped to its leg from one of their offices to another while at the same time uploading the same amount of data to the same destination via their ISPs data lines. The media outlet reporting this triumph said that it took the pigeon just over 1 hour to make the 80km/50mile flight, whereas it took over 2 hours to transfer just 4% of that data."
Image

Geeks Prefer Competence To Niceness 300

Posted by samzenpus from the catching-more-geeks-with-vinegar dept.
Death Metal writes "While everyone would like to work for a nice person who is always right, IT pros will prefer a jerk who is always right over a nice person who is always wrong. Wrong creates unnecessary work, impossible situations and major failures. Wrong is evil, and it must be defeated. Capacity for technical reasoning trumps all other professional factors, period."
Classic Games (Games)

Sega Dreamcast Turns 10 193

Posted by Soulskill from the keeps-on-ticking dept.
traycerb writes "It's been 10 years since 9/9/1999, when the Dreamcast launched on American shores. The hardware was ahead of its time; online capability, web browser, a visual memory unit, and a controller that anticipated the much-loved Xbox 360 controller. The games were amazing: Jet Set Radio (the first popular 3d cell-shaded game on a console), Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (still the apotheosis of 2-d fighting; just try finding a copy on ebay), Soul Calibur (still looks good compared to the recent Xbox/PS3 versions), NFL 2K (came out of nowhere, and was so good that it shook EA into spending tens of millions of dollars to seal up exclusivity for NFL rights), and many others. No doubt some of the reasons for the Dreamcast's demise lay with Sega, whose dubious hardware decisions (ahem, 32x) finally caught up to them, in the form of ambivalence from both developers and gamers, just as the console-making world was shifting to the multinationals with big pockets who were willing to spend it on pricey hardware design (or could absorb the cost of faulty hardware design). It was also one of the first consoles widely used for homebrew. In honor of the 10th anniversary, a new game is being released for the Dreamcast, called Rush Rush Rally Racing. The Dreamcast is dead! Long live the Dreamcast!"

Comment Sounds familiar... (Score 1) 105

by merlin65537 (#29340631) Attached to: Parental Control Software Datamines Kids' Online Conversations
You know those e-mail filters where you have to solve a CAPTCHA when you send somebody an e-mail? With some of those, when you fill out the CAPTCHA, you get e-mails a couple of days/weeks later asking you if you want to sign up for their service - so they are trying to sell an anti-spam product by sending spam. Actually I also got some real spam (=randomly picked addresses) advertising these services, too. Same principle ...
Biotech

Submission + - Pacific Ocean garbage patch worries researchers (yahoo.com) 1

Submitted by NeverVotedBush
NeverVotedBush writes: During their August fact-finding expedition, a group of University of California scientists found much more debris than they expected. The team announced their observations at a San Diego press conference The sheer quantity of plastic that accumulates in the North Pacific Gyre has scientists worried about how it might harm the sea creatures there. A study released earlier this month estimated that thousands of tons of plastic debris wind up in the oceans every year, and some of that has ended up in the swirling currents of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Katsuhiko Saido, a chemist at Nihon University, Chiba, Japan, told the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society last week that plastic actually does decompose, releasing potentially toxic chemicals that can disrupt the functioning of hormones in animals and marine life. Plastics have entangled birds and turned up in the bellies of fish, and one paper cited by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates 100,000 marine mammals die trash-related deaths each year.

Comment Re:SD and DRM (Score 1) 316

by merlin65537 (#29227295) Attached to: My flash memory is mostly in the form of ...

But at least you can easily access it in SPI mode from a microcontroller. This way, if you find a card in the far away future, assuming its flash memory still works, you can easily access it without implementing a USB host controller. Slow, but it's going to work!

But I do think this is one of the cases where many of the people who buy these cards mistake "secure" for "your data is more secure on this type of card from whatever danger" instead of "data can be stored on this card more secure FROM you"... that said, I think we should vote for "secure" as the un-word of the year!
The Internet

Pirate Bay Archive Goes Online 94

Posted by timothy from the action-reaction-counterreaction dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "With the main Pirate Bay website experiencing DNS issues, downtime and uncertainty about both the lawsuits and potential sale to GGF, a Pirate Bay clone has already gone online. True to their principles, someone at TPB put up a torrent with a 21.3 GB copy of the site as it exists today. And now that archive is alive, at BTArena.net. Linus' old adage about backing up everything by putting it on FTP and letting the world mirror it may need to be updated. Torrents are much more efficient." "Downtime" may be a nice word for it; reader Underholdning writes "The Register has a story about a Swedish court ordering ISPs to disconnect The Pirate Bay or face a massive daily fine. The reason for the shutdown was an upcoming civil lawsuit by copyright holders. As usual, Torrentfreak has an updated story. It seems like the takedown until now has been successful." Believe what you will; the site itself says they'll be back up "in a few hours."
Linux Business

Submission + - GPL2 Libraries - Is there a point ?

Submitted by PiSkyHi
PiSkyHi writes: I understand that if I build an application that links with a library that is licensed under GPL2, I must also make my application GPL2. I can see that value in this for an application, but for a library, what's to stop me separating my program into a GPL2 compliant client app that talks to the rest of my (choose my own license) application ?
Businesses

Submission + - Nine reasons RadioShack shouldn't change its name (technologizer.com) 1

Submitted by
Harry
Harry writes: "Rumor has it that RadioShack is planning to rebrand itself as The Shack later this year, after eighty-eight years under the old name (most of them with a space inbetween "Radio" and "Shack"). I hope it's not true, because I don't think the move would do a thing to make the retailer a better, more successful business."

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Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

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