Some Ericsson and Nokia phones (and others too I'm sure) can be programmed by cable. Get a cheap refillable SIM card (such as Comviq or DJuice if you live in Sweden).
Hook up a laptop with Linux to the phone. If you have burglar alarms, fire alarm, flooding alarms on your summer house/boat whatever, you can hook them up to your computer. It is fairly trivial to write a script that, if one of the alarms go off, the phone SMSes you, the closest neighbour, your significant other. "This is Lars's summer house. At 19.55 2003-03-14 the burglar alarm went off."
Drawbacks - the system can be a bit fragile. You must find a place for the laptop and all cables. SMSes aren't guaranteed to arrive on time, or indeed at all. You have to check that the systems boots up correctly after a power outage. And you can get a complete intruder system that is smaller and more reliable for not much money. Still, it is pretty cool in a geeky way.
Re:Poor choice of dates, and show me the numbers.
on
Women Leaving I.T.
·
· Score: 1
That article is very poor journalism, even by the low standards of today.
I really liked the forced sentence: "Imagine the increased stress for her if an enterprise software [paid ad link] update occurs in her absence, for instance."
We are getting a bit offtopic here with a debate on death penalty, but here are my views:
If lack of death penalty leads to fascism (if you allow me to reduce your argument...), why did 20th century Spain, Germany and Italy, three countries *with* death penalty, fall to fascism?
You are also presenting a false dichotomy - *either* we have death penalty, *or* we have people serving token amounts of time and walking away on technicalities.
All that is, for me at least, irrelevant though. Once you have accepted that killing humans is acceptable, you have gone too far. Way too far. That is my only moral absolute.
The opposite of the evil situation where people who have recieved the death penalty are prevented from commiting suicide, because only the state gets to decide time and means of death of the person. The ultimate in fascist control. "You are a thing. We control you totally, life and death".
My own opinion is that people should have the right to decide what to do with their own lives, and that includes deciding how to die.
However, I still find suicide to be the ultimately selfish act. I was on a ski trip a few years back. One guy who came along (aquaintance of an aquaintance) talked a lot about having been depressed and still occasionally considering suicide. His closest friend on the trip said "Ok, but you will leave your children without a father, and emotionally devastated. Also consider what an example you are setting for them. You will show them that suicide is an acceptable situation when they are depressed. Consider that first."
The guy became very silent after that. I felt sorry for him of course. While true, the guilt might have been another emotional burden for him.
Amen. Note that almost all here chose to focus on his "improve marketability" words. He also mentioned "complementing his education".
Do humanistic studies such as languages or history. You might not get as much chance of a salary boost, but you will become a better and more interesting person.
It is like the zen koan. If you are at the top of a flagpole, how do you get any higher? Improve yourself.
Java is mature language, lots of jobs available, and there are a huge number of open source projects written for it. Unlike C#, is not a Microsoft product. Personally, I think it looks nicer than C#. Java has the Java Community Process where I can decide how it will develop in the future, and there are Open Source implementations such as Classpath available (which BTW makes it possible to run Java under Mono).
Did your company provide adequate training? As another poster noticed, it is usually not any difference in quality that matters, it is what people are used to.
I did that mistake at my previous job where I was a sysadmin. One of the girls asked me if I could get a licence for Photoshop for her. It turned out she was just going to do some light website graphics. Budget is tight of course, and I knew she was pretty smart and computer savvy, so I downloaded Gimp for her. Started it, showed her to do to the most basic things and said, "right click on a picture and you will get a pop-up menu with all the possible commands". A week later or so the head sysadmin came by and said "We got the Photoshop licence, could you install it at her desk?".
When I asked her why she didn't use Gimp, she basically said "I hated it." I must have looked a bit crestfallen, so she quickly said: "I'm sure it's great once you know it, but I couldn't figure it out, and I don't have the time. It's better if I go with what I'm used to."
Basically humans are very conservative. Once they are used to something, that is what they like. No wonder Microsoft gives huge discounts to schools. Hook 'em while they are young. I've read success stories about companies going Open Source here on Slashdot, but most include a week or so of training.
The only exception I found was with Firefox. Two people at the job had problems with IE. It crashed or they got spyware, etc. I installed Firefox for them and said that they should try it, and if they didn't like it I could take a longer look at IE. They both came later and said "I love it!! No more pop-up ads, it's fast, looks nice..."
Tastes can change quite a lot in five years, and so can computers. Five years ago people might have put up with large boxes or annoying fan noises, but then when they see a small Playstation 2, or a Mac that is so quiet that you have to check the LEDs to see if it is on, they might start to think - hey, why can't I get that with my PC?
What the hell is happening to the PC industry? It used to be all about making better faster machines with more features and now the trend is to make smaller machines with less features?????
What happened was that people got fed up with big ugly boxes that used a lot of power to make a lot of noise and heat. Especially since few people apart from gamers need the processing power of new machines. Being small, unobtrusive, less energy hungry, cool and quiet are also features you know, stuff that a lot of people are obviously willing to pay for. Hardly marketing spin.
Small and quiet really is the new overclocking. A lot of PC makers have been working on smaller models for a long time, but they really have to work hard to queeze the same features as a normal size box has (and most customers demand) into a small size box with all the heat problems. So far only Shuttle seem to make a lot of profit from what I've heard. That box was really pathetically similar to the MiniMac though.
A SFF computer is a great choice, if you know what you are getting. NOT a gaming station. High end processors and graphics cards just generate too much heat inside that small box, you will get problems. Especially if you try to do overclocking (do people still do that? Why do reviewers keep talking about it?). In my opinion they are not a good choice for businesses either unfortunately. They are too cramped to work in if a support guy need to make a quick upgrade or replace a problematic part.
They are perfect as a home entertainment center, or as a computer where you mainly do stuff like surf, mail, develop... Much higher family acceptance factor than a big beige box with a loud fan.
Global warming would clearly leave the world a better place for all of us (especially the world's poor and hungry!), with more rainfall, warmer winters, more food, and so on.
Hehe, what massive BS. Last time I heard that was Putin saying that global warming would be good economically for Russia because Russians would need to spend less money on fur hats. Oh, and the "greening planet" oil industry shills of course.
Once upon a time, MS exposed the GDI to Java, and Sun threw a fit and sued them. They tend to do that whenever anyone tries to "extend" their precious language.
Look, back at the end of 1990s MS and Sun signed a contract which said MS could use Java on Windows, use the Java trademark etc, IF and only IF MS agreed to follow a few simple rules. For instance, was perfectly free to add functionality, if they, like everyone else, did this in their OWN library (com.microsoft.java.applet...) They were also free to do their own implementation, but then they could NOT call it Java.
Microsoft did not do this. They continued to claim that they used Java, and at the same time deliberately attempted to break it by adding Microsoft specific behaviour to the core java classes. The goal was obvious - once enough people were programming to the Microsoft target, users on all other platforms would start to complain that Java was broken and only Microsoft did it right.
A blatant breach of contract, and pretty dirty tactics to boot. Sun sued, they won, Microsoft cloned Java the language, called it C#, cloned Java the platform, called it.Net, and here we are.
C#, and the.Net CLR are actual ECMA standards, are more open than Java, and are actually extensible.
I can join the JCP and vote on how Java will develop in the future. Show me where I can do this with C# and.Net.
Java evangelists need not reply, I've yet to be convinced.
Oh, aren't you a tease. On one hand you say we can't reply, and on the other you say "I've YET to be convinced".:-)
You should have been honest and said "I will NEVER be convinced", since that is what you mean, right? Nice to see you keep an open mind though.
So consider this not directed at you, but at all the other readers: You can use SWT, gcc, or one of the many bindings from java to native widgets that exist.
The first time I ever had a video card upgrade was with an SLI add on card on my old 120mhz intel. There where clouds in mechwarrior after I installed it!
Considering how much heat modern graphic cards generates, if you put two in there I bet you will see clouds coming from your computer in no time!
Yep, pretty good explanation. It's pretty hard to catch all of them if you are using a language susceptible to this problem.
When I was subscribing to bugtrack I read about people who had found a security problem in a simple game written in C included in many Linux distros. The overflow? Second player name.:-)
Re:Bad reviews on Vampire: Bloodlines the cause?
on
Troika Games Closes
·
· Score: 1
I loved Vampire because it was so ambitious, and that of course is why there were so many bugs. I haven't played any console RPGs lately, but back when I did (FF7 etc) I was struck by how incredibly linear the plot was in the japanese games. You could act like a complete asshole to Tifa and theotherone the whole game, but both would *still* sit down at predecided plot points and have tentative talks with you about their developing feelings for you, and then fall madly in love with you before the game ended.
Changing stats for your character wouldn't change how you solved a mission or in what order you did them, it would only change how much damage they did when whacking someone with a sword or casting a spell. The ending was always the same.
Compare this with Vampire: You get different missions and dialogues depending on which clan you choose to play. You get different possible dialog answers depending on if you are male or female, persuasive, dumb, etc. You get very different endings depending on if you played good or evil and who you choose to trust and align yourself with, if anyone, but don't expect all of them to be happy endings. You can develop your character as a magician, a gunslinger, a Thief like steal-without-being-noticed, a Splinter Cell/Metal Gear sneaky assassin, a charismatic seducer, a crazy katana wielding maniac, etc, and the game tries to challenge you and let you have fun either way, so you can play it as a shooter, a sneak-em-up, a talkative RPG, etc. Of course there are going to be more bugs in this, its at least 20 different games in one!
Strange how differently people can experience a game. I thought the graphics were excellent, both technically and the artwork. Music and effects were also good, especially the LA Downtown theme.
I agree with you when it came to stability though, some bugs were a bit hard to forgive. I came to places where objects or event triggers seemed just to have failed to load, so the game was impossible to continue unless you went back to an earlier save and replayed (doors not opening though I had the key, cars hanging in the air because all car tires on the level had failed to load, vital characters standing still and not reacting when you approached or tried to talk to them).
Still... sad sad sad that they close. A very few companies seem to try to develop games as a new artform, giving you experiences you can't get from books or films. Troika in my opinion was one of them. Obsidian (with people from Planescape: Torment and Fallout) looks like another. They also seem to want to make incredibly ambitious games, but since Lucasarts rushed Kotor2 out, they might eventually get the same reputation as Troika and meet the same end.
Roger Ebert on Godzilla (1998): "Going to see "Godzilla" at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica. It's a rebuke to the faith that the building represents. Cannes touchingly adheres to a belief that film can be intelligent, moving and grand. "Godzilla" is a big, ugly, ungainly device to give teenagers the impression they are seeing a movie. It was the festival's closing film, coming at the end like the horses in a parade, perhaps for the same reason."
Does it have any significance that SW3 is first though? The canary in the mine perhaps?
Yeah...I'm moving, and found some old magazines, including an old issue of Wired. A big smiley on the cover with a flower in its mouth. The header: "The economy is booming, the environment is getting better, we are living longer and happier lives. Ahead of us is an era of unparallelled prosperity and happiness. You got a problem with that?" (Or something to that effect.)
Hehe.... I thought it was silly even when I bought it. Wish I could have the writers here so I could really rub their noses in it.:-)
Great to see a new version coming up. I was considering writing a review for Slashdot of this series. I like O'Reilly a lot, but to be honest they have nothing as good as this. If you are a Java programmer you should get all three.
Second book in series is best. It has a huge number of "best practices" I haven't found anywhere else - how fine grained tests should be, how to make sure you write all the important tests ("Right-B.I.C.E.P.") and so on.
So with this new book the series is now: 1: Version control with {CVS, Subversion} 2: Unit testing with {Junit, Nunit} 3. Pragmatic Project Automation - How to Build, Deploy, and Monitor Java Applications
Fud fud and more goddamn fud more like it. "Sun has decided that Linux is a threat" "Sun are in bed with MS". You mean the settlement patent that Gosling recently said "means less and less to us".
Sun gave us Open Office, and a damn lot of support for free, as well as a shitload of other things, and now you are "wondering" (a sneakier more underhanded way of accusing them) if they are going to stop. Well, if that is the gratitude they get, don't be surprised if they do.
I wonder how long Sun will still distribute GNU licensed software with Solaris.
And what does this have to do with anything? They have no reason to remove it, and if they did this would only be an inconvenience to Solaris users. It would do nothing to hurt GNU/GPL/Linux or whatever.
It is only logical that Sun use it's resources against it major threat, which is now Linux and the GPL.
Hey, there are loads of open source databases already. Why would this be any more of a threat than the others?
I also object to this FUD that Sun is out to destroy Linux. There is an amazing amount of badwill on Slashdot towards Sun.
Bruce Perens compared the new CDDL licence to Sun "holding a gun" to the heads of the Linux community and "asking them to be grateful for it". WTF? No one is forcing the Linux community to use this database or the patents previously discussed. It is Suns products, they can do what they want with them.
And we are totally free to ignore them if we want to.
Slashdot Mirror
Some Ericsson and Nokia phones (and others too I'm sure) can be programmed by cable. Get a cheap refillable SIM card (such as Comviq or DJuice if you live in Sweden).
Hook up a laptop with Linux to the phone. If you have burglar alarms, fire alarm, flooding alarms on your summer house/boat whatever, you can hook them up to your computer. It is fairly trivial to write a script that, if one of the alarms go off, the phone SMSes you, the closest neighbour, your significant other.
"This is Lars's summer house. At 19.55 2003-03-14 the burglar alarm went off."
Drawbacks - the system can be a bit fragile. You must find a place for the laptop and all cables. SMSes aren't guaranteed to arrive on time, or indeed at all. You have to check that the systems boots up correctly after a power outage. And you can get a complete intruder system that is smaller and more reliable for not much money. Still, it is pretty cool in a geeky way.
That article is very poor journalism, even by the low standards of today.
I really liked the forced sentence: "Imagine the increased stress for her if an enterprise software [paid ad link] update occurs in her absence, for instance."
We are getting a bit offtopic here with a debate on death penalty, but here are my views:
If lack of death penalty leads to fascism (if you allow me to reduce your argument...), why did 20th century Spain, Germany and Italy, three countries *with* death penalty, fall to fascism?
You are also presenting a false dichotomy - *either* we have death penalty, *or* we have people serving token amounts of time and walking away on technicalities.
All that is, for me at least, irrelevant though. Once you have accepted that killing humans is acceptable, you have gone too far. Way too far. That is my only moral absolute.
Yes, I suspected that it might do more harm than good. Thanks for posting that, I'll bookmark it for future reference.
The opposite of the evil situation where people who have recieved the death penalty are prevented from commiting suicide, because only the state gets to decide time and means of death of the person. The ultimate in fascist control. "You are a thing. We control you totally, life and death".
My own opinion is that people should have the right to decide what to do with their own lives, and that includes deciding how to die.
However, I still find suicide to be the ultimately selfish act. I was on a ski trip a few years back. One guy who came along (aquaintance of an aquaintance) talked a lot about having been depressed and still occasionally considering suicide. His closest friend on the trip said "Ok, but you will leave your children without a father, and emotionally devastated. Also consider what an example you are setting for them. You will show them that suicide is an acceptable situation when they are depressed. Consider that first."
The guy became very silent after that. I felt sorry for him of course. While true, the guilt might have been another emotional burden for him.
Here's to hoping clue is contagious.
Clue IS contagious, but scientists recently discovered that ignorance is radioactive and kills clue every time, I'm sorry to say.
Amen. Note that almost all here chose to focus on his "improve marketability" words. He also mentioned "complementing his education".
Do humanistic studies such as languages or history. You might not get as much chance of a salary boost, but you will become a better and more interesting person.
It is like the zen koan. If you are at the top of a flagpole, how do you get any higher? Improve yourself.
Java is mature language, lots of jobs available, and there are a huge number of open source projects written for it. Unlike C#, is not a Microsoft product. Personally, I think it looks nicer than C#. Java has the Java Community Process where I can decide how it will develop in the future, and there are Open Source implementations such as Classpath available (which BTW makes it possible to run Java under Mono).
Why the hell would I want to use C#?
Did your company provide adequate training? As another poster noticed, it is usually not any difference in quality that matters, it is what people are used to.
I did that mistake at my previous job where I was a sysadmin. One of the girls asked me if I could get a licence for Photoshop for her. It turned out she was just going to do some light website graphics. Budget is tight of course, and I knew she was pretty smart and computer savvy, so I downloaded Gimp for her. Started it, showed her to do to the most basic things and said, "right click on a picture and you will get a pop-up menu with all the possible commands". A week later or so the head sysadmin came by and said "We got the Photoshop licence, could you install it at her desk?".
When I asked her why she didn't use Gimp, she basically said "I hated it." I must have looked a bit crestfallen, so she quickly said: "I'm sure it's great once you know it, but I couldn't figure it out, and I don't have the time. It's better if I go with what I'm used to."
Basically humans are very conservative. Once they are used to something, that is what they like. No wonder Microsoft gives huge discounts to schools. Hook 'em while they are young. I've read success stories about companies going Open Source here on Slashdot, but most include a week or so of training.
The only exception I found was with Firefox. Two people at the job had problems with IE. It crashed or they got spyware, etc. I installed Firefox for them and said that they should try it, and if they didn't like it I could take a longer look at IE. They both came later and said "I love it!! No more pop-up ads, it's fast, looks nice..."
Tastes can change quite a lot in five years, and so can computers. Five years ago people might have put up with large boxes or annoying fan noises, but then when they see a small Playstation 2, or a Mac that is so quiet that you have to check the LEDs to see if it is on, they might start to think - hey, why can't I get that with my PC?
What the hell is happening to the PC industry? It used to be all about making better faster machines with more features and now the trend is to make smaller machines with less features?????
What happened was that people got fed up with big ugly boxes that used a lot of power to make a lot of noise and heat. Especially since few people apart from gamers need the processing power of new machines. Being small, unobtrusive, less energy hungry, cool and quiet are also features you know, stuff that a lot of people are obviously willing to pay for. Hardly marketing spin.
Can Anyone say Shuttle PC?
"Shuttle PC!"
Small and quiet really is the new overclocking. A lot of PC makers have been working on smaller models for a long time, but they really have to work hard to queeze the same features as a normal size box has (and most customers demand) into a small size box with all the heat problems. So far only Shuttle seem to make a lot of profit from what I've heard. That box was really pathetically similar to the MiniMac though.
A SFF computer is a great choice, if you know what you are getting. NOT a gaming station. High end processors and graphics cards just generate too much heat inside that small box, you will get problems. Especially if you try to do overclocking (do people still do that? Why do reviewers keep talking about it?). In my opinion they are not a good choice for businesses either unfortunately. They are too cramped to work in if a support guy need to make a quick upgrade or replace a problematic part.
They are perfect as a home entertainment center, or as a computer where you mainly do stuff like surf, mail, develop... Much higher family acceptance factor than a big beige box with a loud fan.
Link for fans of small-is-beautiful:
http://www.sfftech.com
Global warming would clearly leave the world a better place for all of us (especially the world's poor and hungry!), with more rainfall, warmer winters, more food, and so on.
Hehe, what massive BS. Last time I heard that was Putin saying that global warming would be good economically for Russia because Russians would need to spend less money on fur hats. Oh, and the "greening planet" oil industry shills of course.
Once upon a time, MS exposed the GDI to Java, and Sun threw a fit and sued them. They tend to do that whenever anyone tries to "extend" their precious language.
.Net, and here we are.
.Net CLR are actual ECMA standards, are more open than Java, and are actually extensible.
.Net.
Look, back at the end of 1990s MS and Sun signed a contract which said MS could use Java on Windows, use the Java trademark etc, IF and only IF MS agreed to follow a few simple rules. For instance, was perfectly free to add functionality, if they, like everyone else, did this in their OWN library (com.microsoft.java.applet...) They were also free to do their own implementation, but then they could NOT call it Java.
Microsoft did not do this. They continued to claim that they used Java, and at the same time deliberately attempted to break it by adding Microsoft specific behaviour to the core java classes. The goal was obvious - once enough people were programming to the Microsoft target, users on all other platforms would start to complain that Java was broken and only Microsoft did it right.
A blatant breach of contract, and pretty dirty tactics to boot. Sun sued, they won, Microsoft cloned Java the language, called it C#, cloned Java the platform, called it
C#, and the
I can join the JCP and vote on how Java will develop in the future. Show me where I can do this with C# and
Java evangelists need not reply, I've yet to be convinced.
:-)
Oh, aren't you a tease. On one hand you say we can't reply, and on the other you say "I've YET to be convinced".
You should have been honest and said "I will NEVER be convinced", since that is what you mean, right? Nice to see you keep an open mind though.
So consider this not directed at you, but at all the other readers:
You can use SWT, gcc, or one of the many bindings from java to native widgets that exist.
The first time I ever had a video card upgrade was with an SLI add on card on my old 120mhz intel. There where clouds in mechwarrior after I installed it!
Considering how much heat modern graphic cards generates, if you put two in there I bet you will see clouds coming from your computer in no time!
Yep, pretty good explanation. It's pretty hard to catch all of them if you are using a language susceptible to this problem.
:-)
When I was subscribing to bugtrack I read about people who had found a security problem in a simple game written in C included in many Linux distros. The overflow? Second player name.
I loved Vampire because it was so ambitious, and that of course is why there were so many bugs. I haven't played any console RPGs lately, but back when I did (FF7 etc) I was struck by how incredibly linear the plot was in the japanese games. You could act like a complete asshole to Tifa and theotherone the whole game, but both would *still* sit down at predecided plot points and have tentative talks with you about their developing feelings for you, and then fall madly in love with you before the game ended.
Changing stats for your character wouldn't change how you solved a mission or in what order you did them, it would only change how much damage they did when whacking someone with a sword or casting a spell. The ending was always the same.
Compare this with Vampire:
You get different missions and dialogues depending on which clan you choose to play. You get different possible dialog answers depending on if you are male or female, persuasive, dumb, etc. You get very different endings depending on if you played good or evil and who you choose to trust and align yourself with, if anyone, but don't expect all of them to be happy endings. You can develop your character as a magician, a gunslinger, a Thief like steal-without-being-noticed, a Splinter Cell/Metal Gear sneaky assassin, a charismatic seducer, a crazy katana wielding maniac, etc, and the game tries to challenge you and let you have fun either way, so you can play it as a shooter, a sneak-em-up, a talkative RPG, etc. Of course there are going to be more bugs in this, its at least 20 different games in one!
Strange how differently people can experience a game. I thought the graphics were excellent, both technically and the artwork. Music and effects were also good, especially the LA Downtown theme.
I agree with you when it came to stability though, some bugs were a bit hard to forgive. I came to places where objects or event triggers seemed just to have failed to load, so the game was impossible to continue unless you went back to an earlier save and replayed (doors not opening though I had the key, cars hanging in the air because all car tires on the level had failed to load, vital characters standing still and not reacting when you approached or tried to talk to them).
Still... sad sad sad that they close. A very few companies seem to try to develop games as a new artform, giving you experiences you can't get from books or films. Troika in my opinion was one of them. Obsidian (with people from Planescape: Torment and Fallout) looks like another. They also seem to want to make incredibly ambitious games, but since Lucasarts rushed Kotor2 out, they might eventually get the same reputation as Troika and meet the same end.
Oh, so THAT is Campbell's Hero's Journey.
Roger Ebert on Godzilla (1998):
"Going to see "Godzilla" at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica. It's a rebuke to the faith that the building represents. Cannes touchingly adheres to a belief that film can be intelligent, moving and grand. "Godzilla" is a big, ugly, ungainly device to give teenagers the impression they are seeing a movie. It was the festival's closing film, coming at the end like the horses in a parade, perhaps for the same reason."
Does it have any significance that SW3 is first though? The canary in the mine perhaps?
Yeah...I'm moving, and found some old magazines, including an old issue of Wired. A big smiley on the cover with a flower in its mouth. The header: "The economy is booming, the environment is getting better, we are living longer and happier lives. Ahead of us is an era of unparallelled prosperity and happiness. You got a problem with that?"
:-)
(Or something to that effect.)
Hehe.... I thought it was silly even when I bought it. Wish I could have the writers here so I could really rub their noses in it.
I REALLY wished I had modpoints for you. You proved the blowhard grandparent poster wrong, but seems no one noticed. Darn.
Great to see a new version coming up. I was considering writing a review for Slashdot of this series. I like O'Reilly a lot, but to be honest they have nothing as good as this. If you are a Java programmer you should get all three.
Second book in series is best. It has a huge number of "best practices" I haven't found anywhere else - how fine grained tests should be, how to make sure you write all the important tests ("Right-B.I.C.E.P.") and so on.
So with this new book the series is now:
1: Version control with {CVS, Subversion}
2: Unit testing with {Junit, Nunit}
3. Pragmatic Project Automation - How to Build, Deploy, and Monitor Java Applications
Ok, I'll finish gushing now.
Insightful?
Fud fud and more goddamn fud more like it. "Sun has decided that Linux is a threat" "Sun are in bed with MS". You mean the settlement patent that Gosling recently said "means less and less to us".
Sun gave us Open Office, and a damn lot of support for free, as well as a shitload of other things, and now you are "wondering" (a sneakier more underhanded way of accusing them) if they are going to stop. Well, if that is the gratitude they get, don't be surprised if they do.
I wonder how long Sun will still distribute GNU licensed software with Solaris.
And what does this have to do with anything? They have no reason to remove it, and if they did this would only be an inconvenience to Solaris users. It would do nothing to hurt GNU/GPL/Linux or whatever.
It is only logical that Sun use it's resources against it major threat, which is now Linux and the GPL.
Just more unusbstantiated accusations.
Hey, there are loads of open source databases already. Why would this be any more of a threat than the others?
I also object to this FUD that Sun is out to destroy Linux. There is an amazing amount of badwill on Slashdot towards Sun.
Bruce Perens compared the new CDDL licence to Sun "holding a gun" to the heads of the Linux community and "asking them to be grateful for it". WTF? No one is forcing the Linux community to use this database or the patents previously discussed. It is Suns products, they can do what they want with them.
And we are totally free to ignore them if we want to.