24959420
submission
rubycodez writes:
Researchers at the Swiss Federal Technology Institute in Zurich have identified a "Capitalist Network" of well-connected companies that control most of the global economy. They further identified the 147 (one percent) "super-connected" companies that control forty percent or more of the global financial network. If one believes the mega-corporations have most governments of the west in their pockets, does this mean we have a global oligarchy?
21000934
submission
rubycodez writes:
After being thrown out on the streets by Attachmate, the purchasers of Novell, Miguel De Icaza has formed a new company Xamarin to make .NET development tools for Android and iOS. The company will also provide commercial international Mono support. There are those who would say Mono poses a risk of drawing Microsoft patent or other IP litigation for its inclusion in some major Linux distributions, and that these recent events might be the beginning of the demise of widespread use of Mono and other .NETiness in open source software, a good thing.
18758270
submission
rubycodez writes:
A wave of 2012 related hoopla has hit the internet, about the star that makes the "right shoulder" of Orion the hunter, Betelgeuse. Astronomer Phil Plait once again puts rumors to rest. The star will indeed explode as a type II supernova, and when it does it will be brighter than Venus on Earth though not as bright as the full moon. It will be visible in the night sky for weeks, as well as possibly be visible in the day sky for a short time. But that event could happen today, or 100,000 years from now or as much as a million years from now. Since Betelgeuse is over 600 light years away, its violent death will not harm Earth in any way, but definitely will provide a huge bonanza of scientific information about supernova. As geeks, we can only hope the core of Betelgeuse undergoes catastrophic failure in our lifetime.
18634798
submission
rubycodez writes:
Berkeley astronomer Sukanya Chakrabarti has detected perturbations in the gases surrounding our Milky Way and concludes there is a satellite "Galaxy X" 250,000 light years away that is mostly dark matter, but that may contain dwarf stars visible in infrared. She expects many more such dark matter satellites to the Milky Way to be discovered using her technique.
10976336
submission
rubycodez writes:
Oracle, having acquired Sun Microsystems including its Unix(tM), will no longer give away free Solaris licenses. Oracle also states that some features of its Oracle Solaris will not appear in OpenSolaris, which means OpenSolaris may start to die.
8844186
submission
rubycodez writes:
The anti-trust body of the EU, the European Commision has approved Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, believing competition would be preserved. It saw PostgreSQL as a viable independent alternative to MySQL and that market access to Java would not be restricted. Uncertainty about Sun's future has cost over a billion dollars in lost sales in the past year.
8626532
submission
rubycodez writes:
Three meteorites, including one that has been in a British museum for over a century, are going to be put under the electron microscope and ion microprobe by NASA. We're "very, very close to proving there is or has been life [on Mars]," said David McKay, chief of astrobiology at Johnson Space Center.
