Good post over on Slashdot related to Blackboard's patent trials and tribulations. Hopefully this is the final word on this.
[Slashdot Your Rights Online Story | Blackboard Patent Invalidated By Appellate Court]
Tuesday Jul 28, 2009
Thursday Jul 23, 2009
I mentioned earlier about two good examples of graphic design. Here's the 2nd set... all I can say is wow!
[From Artists Create Stunning Works Of Art From Mounds Of Data]
Today I came across two superb examples of graphic design... here's the first one:
[From This Is Where Each of Your 1.421 Trillion Dollars Is Going In 2010 - Death and taxes 2010 - Gizmodo]
Seems to me that there's still a lot of pork and slop in the US Federal Budget.
Lots of things bug me these days about it... the fact that Congress exempts themselves from living just like everyone else is perhaps the biggest one.
If the rest of the US is suffering economically, why does Congress continue to get increases in salary? Maybe they should take a nice pay cut like many people have experienced.
If the proposed healthcare plan is such a good one, why is Congress exempt and get to continue their personalized healthcare? Why don't they get the same wages, healthcare, and retirement benefits that are Armed Forces and Civil Service workers get?
Hmmm, sounds elitist to me.
Tuesday Jul 07, 2009
Sad to see Becta back slide... one step forward, two steps back... I had such hope too. Shame.
[Becta snuggles up to MS on UK schools licensing shake-up • Channel Register]
Tuesday Jun 30, 2009
... that some States are expanding investment in Education.
As a Mac user and devotee, this peaked my interest today and added a little bit of warmth to my soul:
[Maine expands MacBook program to high schools by Macworld.com: Yahoo! Tech ]
Wednesday Jun 10, 2009
Too often these days I see internet "journalists" publishing stories without even the simplest fact checking.
Some are simply innocent mistakes while others are intentional slights. Many are simply lack of good journalistic practices.
The sign of good writers and journalists that simply made innocent mistakes is a retraction and follow-up article.
The symptoms of hacks are either more negative articles or ignoring the blatant errors.
A recent article in the Register by Timothy Prickett Morgan titled "Germans fire up 200 teraflop Juropa2 super" is a good example.
Within the first couple of sentences he uses the phrase, "but beleaguered server maker Sun Microsystems wants everyone to know that the box that was turned on last Friday is comprised of its InfiniBand switches and its Xeon blade servers" setting a specific tone for the rest of the article.
Mr Morgan goes on to say "The Sun gear at FZJ is the second big deal that Sun has closed for its "Constellation" HPC clusters, which are comprised of Sun's own InfiniBand switches (nicknamed "Magnum") and its x64-based "Galaxy" blade servers." further in the article.
Here's where things unwind a bit. Mr Morgan then immediately contradicts himself straight-away by writing that "Sun's first big HPC deal for the Constellation machines was the "Tsubame" cluster in Japan, where NEC was the prime contractor." and "Sun's second big Constellation deal was the 433.2 teraflops "Ranger" cluster at the University of Texas (with 62,976 cores using quad-core Opterons)."
If the Tsubame cluster in Japan was first and the Ranger cluster in Texas was second, how could the Juropa2 cluster also be 2nd?!?
That would make it at least 3rd if my math and logic skills are correct.
In reality, Sun has significantly more Constellation sales than the 3 mentioned in the article. Even limiting it to the "large" scale Constellation sales, a quick search of the Internet provides me with at least 5:
According to a Sun press release done on the KISTI super computer, the KISTI cluster is the 4th installation which would put Juropa2 perhaps as the 5th or 6th at a minimum.
So herein lies the rub, was this a simple mistake by Mr. Morgan, an intentional slight or lack of good journalism?
What Mr. Morgan does next will tell. (Hopefully any corrected version will have the same wide re-distribution as the original. )
Friday May 08, 2009
Here I thought colleges and universities were all about freedom, creativity and education.
From Slashdot: College Threatens to Sue Students Over Email Addresses
It's always amazing to see things like this. Now I admit I put my foot in my mouth from time-to-time but this takes that to a whole new level.
As Bill and Ted once said, "Be excellent to one another"
Wednesday Apr 29, 2009
In light of all the news regarding Sun, much of it sour or negative, Joerg Moellenkamp has a good post on the HHOSUG blog about Sun's recent quarter financial performance... folks, it just isn't us, if you're out there saying Sun stinks because of the year-to-year quarter performance, you must think that Intel really stinks at a 26% decline quarter-to-quarter... even the "jewel" of the tech industry Microsoft reported a decrease in revenue and a 32% decline in net income quarter over quarter.
Regarding systems sales companies, Dell (server+network) is down 17% (down 16% as a whole), HP (servers+storage eg. excluding printers and ink cartridge sales) down 18%, Sun down 20%, IBM (systems and technology) down 23.5%...
As the title of this post says, it's relative.
Saturday Apr 25, 2009
Virtual Box is #3 on the list
Sweet!
Wednesday Dec 10, 2008
Sun is adding two new independent board members.
All I have to say is, "It's about time."
Although I question whether "adding" is the right choice rather than not replacing and maintaining or reducing the number.
Thursday Jul 03, 2008
Jim Grisanzio responds a comment by Joe Bruckmeier, Community Manager for openSuse...
Jim hits the nail on the head with his response.
After reading both entries, it brings up one question, "Does Joe Bruckmeier really understand open source?" Srsly
Perhaps that would have been a better title for this blog entry.
How about this Joe... why don't you all join up with the OpenSolaris community, help port DTrace and ZFS to OpenSuse?
Tuesday May 13, 2008
The Register has an interesting article on Microsoft's deals in the Education market
Monday Jan 07, 2008
One of the things we strive for at Sun is something called "transparency".
Transparency takes many forms. From financial disclosures to just the basic everyday of communication with our customers.
The folks over in our Sun Developers Network put together a nice tutorial sharing how they set-up the Sun Student Courses site using Moodle.
Big Kudos!
The original blog entry here.
This blog copyright 2009 by Dave Pickens
