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Mars

4-Billion-Pixel Panorama View From Curiosity Rover 101

Posted by samzenpus from the take-a-look dept.
A reader points out that there is a great new panorama made from shots from the Curiosity Rover. "Sweep your gaze around Gale Crater on Mars, where NASA's Curiosity rover is currently exploring, with this 4-billion-pixel panorama stitched together from 295 images. ...The entire image stretches 90,000 by 45,000 pixels and uses pictures taken by the rover's two MastCams. The best way to enjoy it is to go into fullscreen mode and slowly soak up the scenery — from the distant high edges of the crater to the enormous and looming Mount Sharp, the rover's eventual destination."
Google

Google Pledges Not To Sue Any Open Source Projects Using Their Patents 153

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the now-and-forever dept.
sfcrazy writes "Google has announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge. In the pledge Google says that they will not sue any user, distributor, or developer of Open Source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Under this pledge, Google is starting off with 10 patents relating to MapReduce, a computing model for processing large data sets first developed at Google. Google says that over time they intend to expand the set of Google's patents covered by the pledge to other technologies." This is in addition to the Open Invention Network, and their general work toward reforming the patent system. The patents covered in the OPN will be free to use in Free/Open Source software for the life of the patent, even if Google should transfer ownership to another party. Read the text of the pledge. It appears that interaction with non-copyleft licenses (MIT/BSD/Apache) is a bit weird: if you create a non-free fork it appears you are no longer covered under the pledge.

Comment Re:Treat yourself and avoid United (Score 2) 74

by KingAdrock (#36484484) Attached to: United Airlines Passengers Stranded By Computer Outage

I'm no United fan, but what would you have them do? Cascade the delays for two days and impact 600 customers instead of the 99 already impacted? Sucks for you of course, but I'm not sure there was a better option (assuming there wasn't alternative metal sitting around unused -- which is unlikely).

Comment Re:The devil in the details (Score 1) 276

by KingAdrock (#33622918) Attached to: Google, Apple and Others Accused of 'No Poaching' Deal

A good example would be with the Microsoft/Yahoo search deal. The companies entered into a strategic partnership that included (among other things) a set of Yahoo! employees that would be transitioned to work for Microsoft. Before and during that transition period it made sense not have the companies poach each others employees.

Comment Re:Exactly! (Score 1) 347

by KingAdrock (#26501427) Attached to: GAO Reports Bailout and Tech Firms Love Tax Havens
Absolutely, and this ludicrous, greedy policy (and regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley) are really helping to kill the US economy. Now a majority of the top IPOs every year occur in other countries. It used to be like 23 of the top 25 IPOs would always be in the US. Last year, it was like 2 of 25.

I'm sure that had nothing to do with the non-IPO friendly economy that started in the US last year.

Comment Google (Score 1) 1

by KingAdrock (#26128665) Attached to: FOSS Ad server serves 300 billion ads per month

While Google now owns DoubleClick's DART, their bread and butter are search and contextual text ads which isn't exactly OpenX's market, although you can traffic AdSense tags through their server. It will be interesting to see what Google does with DFP and if Yahoo's APT platform is able to get market share over the next couple of years.
The Courts

Submission + - Can I be sued for quitting?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I work at a large hosting company in Texas and recently decided to go work for a smaller competitor. I had a great relationship with my employer and wanted to leave on good terms. I felt the new company had just gotten too large and I didn't like working there anymore, I gave them two weeks notice in writing. They were really upset when I insisted on leaving and one week into my last two weeks the V.P. of Sales told me the company was suing me for leaving and suing my new employer for hiring me. They then escorted me out of the building. I was shocked. Should I hire an attorney? Has anybody ever heard of this happening? Do they have any legal basis for suing me? I never signed any non-compete or employment agreement.
The Internet

Submission + - Firefox 3 Plans and IE8 Speculation

Submitted by
ReadWriteWeb
ReadWriteWeb writes: "Information about the next versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer suggest that the two biggest browsers are heading in different directions. Mozilla has published a wiki page detailing its plans for the next version of Firefox, codenamed "Gran Paradiso". Among the mandatory requirements listed for FF3 are improving the add-on experience, providing an extensible bookmarks back-end platform, adding more support for web services "to act as content handlers" — all of which show that Firefox wants to be an independent information broker rather than a simple HTML renderer in its next version. Also in the works is Microsoft's IE8. According to ActiveWin.com, a Microsoft official at CES told them that work has already begun for IE 8 and it may be released as a final product "within 18-24 months". Looking ahead, it's obvious that IE will continue to hook into the advanced functionality that Vista offers.

So while IE7 and Firefox 2 were more alike than different (feature-wise they're practically identical!), with IE8 and FF3 we will likely see the two biggest browsers head off into different directions."

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