Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
Oracle

OpenOffice.org To Be Given Back To the Community 219

An anonymous reader writes "Oracle has stated they will give back the OpenOffice.org productivity suite to the community. Edward Screven, Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect, said the company intends upon 'working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office.' Because there was a 'breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications,' the company believes the OpenOffice.org project would be 'best managed by an organization focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis.'"

Comment Re:No. (Score 1) 407

Videos: $10/mo.
Games: $10/mo.
ebooks: $10/mo.
Software: $10/mo.
Music scores: $10/mo.
Scientific papers: $10/mo.
Recipes: $10/mo.
Knitting instructions: $10/mo.

There's an endless variety of types of copyrighted work. Paying a blanket fee for "music" only sets up the situation for the next type of content owner to demand their tithe from all.

Disney: $10/mo.
WB: $10/mo.
Sony: $10/mo.
CNN: $10/mo.
FOX: $10/mo.

Don't think these megacorporations won't want their own guaranteed slice of your assumed piracy.

Microsoft

Open Source Guy Takes the Hardest Job At Microsoft 325

jbrodkin writes "Gianugo Rabellino, founder of the Italian Linux Society and a key member of the Apache Software Foundation, traded his Linux and Mac PCs in for a Windows 7 laptop and took on a newly created job at Microsoft designed to encourage collaboration between Redmond and open source communities. 'Developers nowadays are mostly to be found in the open source world,' the new Microsoft executive says. 'We need to go where they are.' With Rabellino's help, Microsoft is expanding its successful partnership with PHP developers , but Steve Ballmer and crew are a long way from completely erasing their poor reputation in Linux and open source circles."

Comment Re:Organs? (Score 1) 471

Replying to myself, but the OP's question is very pertinent. The best way to get a properly developed organ is to clone the entire organism; that takes care of the genetic and environmental signals I mentioned above but leaves a question about what to do with the unwanted remainder of the organism.

Comment Re:Organs? (Score 1) 471

That's crap. You don't know what you're talking about.

The likely answer to the OP's question is it would be necessary to reproduce a complicated sequence of activated genes to reproduce the development of the organ over time, the way it does in a foetus. So stem cells would be the likely source material but they don't just turn into a heart or liver by themselves; they need extensive prodding from the environment to go down that route from undifferentiated cells and eventually become a functioning organ.

Comment Re:Quanta? (Score 2, Informative) 196

I changed to xfce recently after trying KDE 4.x for the 2nd time after 12 months (debian lenny to squeeze). The first time, I backed out of my upgrade. The second time, I took a friend's advice and switched to xfce. It's more stable than KDE (kdm locked up my screen twice in a day), much faster, and things mostly work the way I expect.

Comment "Server Error in '/' Application." (Score 3, Funny) 583

Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.

Your God is not so powerful now, is he??

Comment Re:Actually great for these companies! (Score 1) 156

I've had "Securitel" monitored alarms, both the type where cable integrity is monitored at the exchange and the type where the alarm system dials out over PSTN with a low baud-rate modem.

My current alarm system, the LS-30 is much superior to both. Because it's ethernet-enabled, it can be monitored by a security company over the Internet. It also can alert via GSM or PSTN. Of course, one of the features of this alarm system is that the owner doesn't have to get a professional monitoring service, but the choice is there.

I haven't seen security company infrastructure but my impression is that they can achieve much better economies of scale by using the ContactID protocol and net-connected alarms. They can also provide better service to home owners.

Comment Re:is it really copyright trolling? (Score 2, Interesting) 253

Yes, it seems pretty sensible. Righthaven was not harmed at the time of publication. They clearly looked for an infringement and then brought the harm upon themselves.

On the other hand, it could be said that the Las Vegas Review-Journal had suffered harm, and Righthaven bought the rights, thus relieving LVRJ of the harm and taking it upon themselves.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Everybody is talking about the weather but nobody does anything about it." -- Mark Twain

Working...