Comment Kermit! (Score 1) 283
Obviously, Kermit is the clear winner. It must be those great songs he sings and all. I will point you to the lovely band called "Dead Muppets".
Submission + - Death of the Greenphone
phobos13013 writes: Trolltech announced this week that they will discontinue development on their Greenphone platform. The Greenphone was advertised to be the first phone with a user-modifiable environment. Trolltech CTO, Benoit Schilling, stated that they are not really a hardware company and so will focus it's efforts on FIC's Neo 1973, now available. However, FTA, a future wifi-enabled endeavor (possibly a VOIP phone) was hinted at by Schilling.
Submission + - South Africa adopts ODF as a government standard (tectonic.co.za)
ais523 writes: As reported by Tectonic, South Africa's new Mininimum Interoperability Standards for Information Systems in government (MIOS) explain the new rules for which data formats will be used by the government; according to that document, all people working for the South African government must be able to read OpenDocument Format documents by March, and the government aims to use one of its three approved document formats (UTF-8 or ASCII plain text, CSV, or ODF) for all its published documents by the end of 2008. A definition of 'open standard' is also included that appears to rule out OOXML at present (requiring 'multiple implementations', among other things that may also rule it out).
Submission + - Alzheimer's disease as form of diabetes (physorg.com)
Atzanteol writes: Insulin, it turns out, may be as important for the mind as it is for the body. Research in the last few years has raised the possibility that Alzheimer's memory loss could be due to a novel third form of diabetes.
Submission + - 5 Hotspots Where Languages Are Becoming Extinct (anthropology.net)
Ant writes: "Anthropology.net shares an alarming report on the rate of extinction of languages . It says, "Every 14 days a language dies. By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth — many of them never yet recorded — will likely disappear, taking with them a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment, and how the human brain works."
Seen on Neatorama."
Why Doesn't Microsoft Have A Cult Religion? 535
rs232 writes "'Apple has one. So does the Java community, Oracle, IBM, and Google. Lord knows anyone who uses Linux or free and open source software is dedicated to spreading the gospel of St. Linus Torvalds and St. Richard Stallman. But does anyone really worship the Gods of Redmond?' While many Microsoft employees are pumped to work there, article author Michael Singer explores why even enthusiastic Microsoft-watchers acknowledge that customers and product developers are unenthusiastic about the software giant. He theorizes that it comes down to passion: Microsoft lost that a long time ago, he says, and so passionate people gravitate to other projects and products."
