2011 Iditarod News: Some times you just happen to be in the right place at the right time. At the Iditarod "restart"event in Willow, Alaska today, I happened to be standing at the starting gate when four-time Iditarod champion Lance Mackey stepped on the dog sled and headed for Nome, Alaska. Here's a link to the video on my One Man's Alaska website:
A friend of a friend has created a documentary titled "This Is Why We Still Sing The Blues", and with my own interest in the Blues (I'm listening to them now), I thought I'd share a few banners leading to his website. Here's the first one:
Ouch, I have no idea what happened over at CentOS, but it doesn't sound good. Eight of their developers signed (electronically) an "open letter" to Lance Davis (currently display on the centos.org home page). To say the least, it looks like there have been some communication problems on the team, which these developers have made very clear in both their open letter and in a separate statement of facts about their communication problems.
Oracle has won approval from the U.S. government for their purchase of Sun (formerly Sun Microsystems). The deal is still subject to approval by the European Commission(EU). Oracle said they expect the deal to close by August 31 (2009).
I don't own stock in either company, but I'm interested to see what happens to many different Sun products, including:
A couple of cool links tonight related to Linux kernel development, specifically who works on the kernel, who supports it, and the amazing stat that 5,547 lines of code are removed from the kernel every day -- while even more are added.
The links start with The Linux Foundation updating a study about who writes and supports Linux kernel development. Their PDF is available for download here.
Apple announced today that the Snow Leopard version of their Mac OS X operating system will go on sale this Friday, August 28, 2009, and that their online store is now accepting pre-orders. This release brings their operating system to Mac OS X 10.6.
The upgrade is $29 for owners of Mac OS X 10.5 systems, and a five-user, single-household license for $49. For older systems the upgrade will cost more.
Here are a few interesting quotes from the press release:
Two iPhone news stories reported by the Mercury News today. First, France is questioning Apple about "imploding" iPhones. (I don't think "implosion" is the correct word, but hey, they're looking into it. For the record, "implode" means to burst inward, or undergo violent compression.)
Here's a quote from that story:
I've been thinking about investing in Yahoo for a while now, since they brought on Carol Bartz, but even since her hiring, I still haven't been able to think of a good reason to buy their stock.
Then yesterday it was reported that Carl Icahn sold 12.7 million shares in Yahoo at a huge loss. He paid an average of $25 per share to buy the stock, and sold then for less than $15 each, a 40% loss.
GM reported Tuesday that it's Chevrolet Volt electric car could get 230 mpg in city driving. However, Edmunds.com cast doubt on whether drivers will achieve that mileage, as it apparently depends a lot on driving style. (Oh, and wait until you see the sticker price.)
Here's an interesting quote about the Volt technology from SiliconValley.com:
The EU is taking a longer look at Oracle's intended purchases of Sun, saying they want to make sure Oracle is committed to the future of the MySQL database. As we wrote about on our site back on August 21, 2009, you have to wonder about the future of many current Sun products, including not only MySQL, but also other products where there is a collision between Sun and Oracle, including the OpenSSO platform.
Cool link of the day: The Telegraph reports that millions of people are asked to take part in a mass test of "brain training". As the article states:
Scientists have joined together with the BBC to create what they say will be the largest scientific test of whether machines, such as the Nintendo DS, or even just playing Sudoku, can improve memory and brain power.
Reuters.com reports that Steve Jobs got back on stage yesterday to reveal a few new Apple products, including iPod and iTunes updates. Most reports refer to the new products as a yawner, but report that Mr. Jobs seems healthy again, and made this statement regarding the liver transplant and organ donor:
The New York Times reports that AMD is getting away from talking about horsepower in chips, and in a new marketing approach, they will be referring to their chips (systems?) as See, Share, or Create:
As revenue plummets, and their number of journalists has dropped from 400 to 125 over the last nine years, the San Jose Mercury News wrote yesterday that they need help from readers in trying to figure out how to transform their business:
Netflix (finally) awarded a $1M prize to a seven-member group that has been able to improve the Netflix movie recommendation system by at least 10%.
The AP reports that the Netflix contest began in October of 2006, and there were over 51,000 contestants. The competition was apparently very close, with two teams (Ensemble and BellKor) in an apparent dead-heat.
I'm finally catching up on the latest tablet hype. Here's a link to the Microsoft Courier video on the Gizmodo tablet device, and a second link to the Apple tablet device that Gizmodo says is going to "redefine newspapers, textbooks, and magazines."
For the most part I try to avoid the rumor game when it comes to Apple, but when I read on All Things Digital that Apple is planning to increase their capital expenditures by 70% to $1.9 Billion in 2010, well, that's a little more than a rumor.
Wow, you'd think a large website like ibibo.com would have enough people to write their own content, but recently I learned that they've been copying and pasting devdaily.com content onto their website. (And I really do mean copying and pasting.)
If you perform the following Google search:
In the latest news regarding Sun and Oracle -- which is pretty important to my Java and MySQL life -- Oracle has finally won EU approval for their purchase of Sun, and they are also planning to provide a "Sun Road Map " next week.
Here's a brief look at several news stories related to Oracle's purchase of Sun, along with direct links to Oracle documents detailing their plans for Sun technologies like Java and MySQL on the Oracle website.
Looking at various Oracle/Sun news stories, it looks like Java is safe for the time being. As one reporter at ZDNet says it, Oracle's Java strategy is 'business as usual'".
