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Slashback: Hagiography, Oracle, Fusion
Even lukewarm fusion would be satisfy me. driggers writes: "I wrote a review of the book "Excess Heat" for /. last year. I thought you might (or might not :) be interested to learn that the U.S. Navy in February 2002 issued Technical Report No. 1862 titled "Thermal and Nuclear Aspects of the Pd/D2O System," Vol. 1 of which summarizes A Decade of Research at Navy Laboratories."
Dr. Frank Gordon, Head, Navigation and Applied Sciences Department, concludes his foreword with the remark, "It is time for the government funding organizations to invest in this research."
If you modify the source you must keep it accurate, like a Mad Lib. An Anonymous Coward writes "I just noticed the biography of Richard M. Stallman, "Free as in Freedom" by Sam Williams is online at oreilly, released under the GNU Free Documentation License."
What vapors rule the modern day Oracle? MarkedMan writes: "The following CNET article outlines Oracle's reply to the State of California's announcement it was canceling a nearly $100 million dollar contract. It should not come as a surprise, as few companies would give up that kind of money without a fight, not to mention the domino effect if they just rolled over. It would be a tacit admission that they ripped off naive customers."
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
I turn in trajllions of results per day to Brilliant Digital Entertainment. But where's my parade?!
Is very disappointing - it doesn't really explain him at all - other than to explain he is weird and has disgusting table manners (allegedly).
At least it doesn't suffer from the "we're all making millions cos we are brilliant" syndrome that infected even the latest edition of Rebel Code.
Yeah and the sun came up yesterday too! I wonder why the Universe keeps repeating itself uh >:-/
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
All these stories have been posted before!
Yeah, that's the point. Check the title. It's a Slashback, which is a play on the word "Flashback." In other words, this is where we get to hear about previously-posted stories and their outcomes.
qslack.com
Guess I can see why SETI gives out prizes for processing a buttload of data -- they sure as hell won't be giving any prizes for actually finding an ET civilization.
I believe that was Stravinsky, not Picasso (unless Stravinsky stole it from him :-), and the actual quote is
"Lesser artists borrow; true artists steal."
GNU/Richard Stallman was born on the such and such of the year nineteen hundred and such and such. At school nobody liked him because he didn't shower and he smelled really bad so he decided to create Free Software. The End.
I read it (online), and bought a copy. It's a real biography of a real (if unusual) person.
For those who believe that everything must be perfectly bias-free, yes, it does display bias for free software ideals , but that is because it's telling RMS's (suprisingly successful) underdog story, and "triumph against massive odds" reads this way.
A genuinely informative, insightful book - and readable, too.
I'm young and happy girl who lives in Czech Republic.
Hey, I know who this girl is, she's my mail order Czech ex-bride. I want 50%!!!!
The Oracle damage control person has to be credited in the arts of hopeful persuasion, however...
Weren't there shredding trucks involved with this somehow?
And 94 million. I'm still dumbfounded by that amount. Even 45 million. It makes me wonder the government has any money at all to work with if pissing it away so freely is common throughout the country.
The article says Oracle is seeing a downturn in sales. Is any of this due to people switching to the open-source alternatives? I'm not a database geek, but from what I understand, the open-source stuff is getting more and more full-featured. Of course a fortune-500 company doesn't care about the extra $$ for Oracle, but I wonder if they're losing out on the lower end...
Find free books.
Notorious Superstars are usually referred to by one name, i.e., Cher, Madonna & Liberace.
Notorious Uber Geeks are usually referred to by their initials by other wannabe geeks, i.e., RMS, ESR & DNA.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I sometimes worry that computer geeks^H^H^H^H^Hprofessionals, like most of the general public, don't actually understand science.
So I'm relieved to see stories like this. The reviewer is fascinated by a book extolling sloppy science, and that's sad. Maybe such stories (like, say this) shouldn't get posted. But it's a relief to see so many thoughtful, highly moderated comments explain what science is, what it means, and why the original post doesn't know what it's talking about.
Information that seems fresher that good ol' slash dot comes out and they redo old stuff... We need more people to post things on this site so these don't get so old...
how did i know her 'prize' was going to be a /.ing of lame pickup attempts from every pasty rastor-burned geek in the U.S.
For her sake, I wish they'd skewed the results.
From the SETI story:
Can't we please have a picture of the winner?
WTF?
Would timothy have posted that if it was a guy?
Hell no.
Women deserve to be treated as individuals and not some piece of meat you're hoping to hook up, timothy. Is it any wonder there are so few women in tech with assholes acting like this all the time?
Show a monicrom of decency, stick to be an editor on slashdot, and continue to try and get laid on your damn dime.
Jerk.
Oracle is not experiencing any kind of market erosion due to open-source software. Anything you run off PostgreSQL could be ported to Oracle, but you'd probably be a dummy to do so. The reverse is rarely true (except the dummy part).
Breakfast served all day!
Did I miss that link? I feel like Opus when he flipped on the news to hear "...and that is the single most poisonous to penguins item you can find in every household."
(no text)
Just what in the hell is wrong with Oracle's actions concerning the deal with California? So California has some real idiots negotiating for it, somehow Oracle is to blame for that? Give me a break.
Of course, this is slashdot. Big corporation, bad, big government, good!
The winner of the 500 millionth result, Milada had the odds stacked against her. First, she is a she and we all know what the rates are there in the geek world. Next, she's not from the US (41.5% of SETI contributers are US residents), she's listed as Czech (only about 0.6% of the SETI contributers are Czech residents). And last she's only returned (as of this post) 92 results!
Such a combination is so astronomically unlikely, I think we've found our ET people!
But seriously I'm glad the prize went to someone who's got this unlikely profile, it just proves how truly global and widespread the SETI appeal is. Congratulations to SETI and Milada!
Anybody want a peanut?
You may add a passage of up to five words as a Front-Cover Text, and a passage of up to 25 words as a Back-Cover Text, to the end of the list of Cover Texts in the Modified Version.
Free as in Freedom: As told by Bill Gates
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
It's a Slashback, which is a play on the word "Flashback." In other words, this is where we get to hear about previously-posted stories
/. articles be in Slashback then?
Shouldn't something like 86% of the
</sarcasm>
It never ceases to amaze me when interesting anomolous results are discarded by the mainstream community. Yes, 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs'. But closed cell calorimetry is very hard to do right, and the electrodes are tricky to setup.
But bottom line, its an electrochemical cell that exposes dental x-ray film left next to the jar, and tritium is sometimes produced, all while little intermittent hot spots show up on IR.
So what if "its impossible!" Something interesting is happening, and it deserves to be studied properly, not dismissed...
According to that Navy report, Fleischmann and Pons were right all along. Cold fusion really does exist and it is nuclear, not an artifact of some chemical processes.
So why isn't this being jumped on? It could actually be, as was announced back in 1989, a fruitful course of research and a possible solution to our power problems (as Dr. Frank Gordon writes in the foreward).
I think so, you can get an electronic copy free.
But I agree with you on RMS being an asshole, even if it costs me some of my karma points, currently capped at 50. I absolutely refuse to call my OS a GNU/Linux, just as I refuse to call my car a GOODYEAR/Chevrolet.
... posted frequently on their website.
... thanks for the presumption and venting. Sheesh.
"Would timothy have posted that if it was a guy?"
Actually, Yes. I forget what the frequency is (day? week?) but they already have random users up there; I thought it might be nice to have one of the half-billionth-results winner, especially with the delay in announcing who it is. Having a little profile up is better than nothing, though.
But
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I wish I could give this quote a correct attribution (I wish even more that I had said it originally): "It is morally wrong to allow ignorant end-users to keep their money."
Oracle Government Services follow a strategy of vertical systems development for shelf solutions to do things like process and manage motor vehicle records, or summarize environmental sampling results and forward reports to the federal EPA at a time and in a format required by law.
I'm deliberately picking generic examples applicable to any state, since I don't remember it being mentioned in anything I read exactly what the software in question was intended to do.
These packages tend to be astronomically expensive. So would the alternatives from competitors like IBM or other developers active in that market, because their cost is controlled by the time, expense and administrative elaboration involved for the other alternative of an individual state assembling a qualified project team and developing and maintaining a codebase of their own (and getting it right).
It doesn't hold up to think of this as: "CA paying $100M for a copy of MySQL" Even if the database is Oracle Enterprise, it's still one of the smaller components of the overall package. The big numbers come from things like the specialized form and report bundles, installation, training, network construction (even a small state can be expected to have node locations all over the place) and system administration.
Another point regarding this specific contract was that the package line items and license counts were stipulated by a third-party consultancy operating on behalf of the state, which is now the subject of official fact-finding, perhaps with some justification. So far no evidence has emerged that anyone working for Oracle itself knew anything about it until after the purchase was signed off.
As for the downturn: There won't be a Y10K problem for another 9.998 years, and most venture capitalists these days know better than to write blank checks to 3 guys starting poopychute.com for Oracle software to manage the 5 million customers they say they're gonna get on page 72 of their business plan.
give me a
When, after the election, she started asserting influence, conservative wags referred to it as "creeping Rodhamism".
Where does the "more licences them employees, including gardeners/cleaning staff" story fit in?
According to the published stories, it came from the consultants hired by the state to manage the needs assessment. If I were a CA taxpayer I would probably be howling for an investigation regarding that too. Could be nothing more than some ditz blew it with an Excel spreadsheet, but I have a hunch their fees were tied somehow to a percentage of the gross.
What about the donations?.
25 grand is fairly routine for a corporation the size and stature of Oracle, and it wouldn't surprise me if Gov. Davis's opponent got a check for a broadly similar amount. Compare that to the $36M that M$ contributed to the Bush campaign in 2000: That's serious monkey business, and not being investigated at all, but let me drop that since this isn't a partisan political forum.
Why would oracle and its reseller be so easy about giving back the money?
Larry Ellison is CEO of one of the biggest companies in California, and understands these things, and what it means in terms of hideous PR and the enmity of his home state government to cling to an impossibly flawed contract he can't possibly get any money from in the long run. As for the reseller: He wasn't even consulted, I'm sure.
[Did they] look around for people who were willing to offer the same service?
No. They hired Coreleone Olive Oil to look for them, and they're the ones who drafted the contract that started the whole stink in the first place.
With this kind of money it is posible to start a company that does just that based on oss or a db2/oracle/whatever licence
This haunts me. Gimme $50M or even $25M and I like to think I could come up with a pretty slick piece of code. (Opensource) The trouble is, i'm outnumbered by uber-persuasive M$CE hotdogs who could do a convincing job of saying they can and then programming the project into the ground.
give me a
Research is ongoing.
Don't make a hasty judgement unless you have actually surveyed the literature enough to get an idea of the actual outcome, please.