netllama - Slashdot User

Submission + - RIAA Backs Down After Receiving Stern Letter

Submitted by

NewYorkCountryLawyer

on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @05:35PM

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "In SONY BMG v. Merchant, in California, the defendant's lawyer wrote the RIAA a rather stern letter recounting how weak the RIAA's evidence is, referring to the deposition of the RIAA's expert witness (see Slashdot commentary), and threatening a malicious prosecution lawsuit. The very same day the RIAA put its tail between its legs and dropped the case, filing a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal. About an hour earlier NYCL had termed the letter a "model letter"; maybe he was right."

Submission + - Do you get a UNIX workstation?

Submitted by

Fished

on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @04:37PM

Fished writes: "This may be a selfish question, but so far as I can tell it hasn't been asked before. I'm currently a Solaris System Engineer in a Very Large Company. This Very Large Company has predictably standardized on Windows as their corporate desktop. However, they are also of the opinion that nobody needs anything but Windows on their desktop. While this may be true for most employees, as a System Engineer I find that my productivity is much lower when I am forced to use Windows on my desktop. I spend way too much time overcoming the ways in which Windows is just different from UNIX, and not enough time getting my job done. Loading Solaris X86 is not an option, since we are required to use a bunch of software that is Windows only (much of it sloppily written, IE only internal websites, with fun things like ActiveX controls.) VmWare works, but is certainly less than ideal. So, I have two questions. First, if you're a UNIX/Linux systems engineer/administrator in a large company, do they give you a desktop for the platform you manage? Second, have you any tips on justifying your need for a second, UNIX-based desktop to the powers that be? I'm hoping enough people will write in that I can point management at this article to demonstrate that we're not just being picky."

Cassini Probes the Hexagon On Saturn 280

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday March 27, 2007 @04:37PM from the monoliths dept.

Riding with Robots sends us to a NASA page with photos of a little-understood hexagonal shape surrounding Saturn's north pole. "This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet." This structure was discovered by the Voyager probes over 20 years ago (here's an 18-year-old note on the mystery). The fact that it's still in place means it is stable and long-lived. Scientists have no idea what causes the hexagon. It's nearly big enough to fit four earths inside — comfortably larger than Jupiter's Great Red Spot. The article has an animation of clouds moving within the hexagon captured in infrared light.

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