Journalism Warning Labels
Tagged journalism, media
Isn’t this what we were afraid Microsoft would do?There is one main reason people in the open source community get so violent over Mono (the open source .NET implementation): the fear that Microsoft could shut everything. There is long standing fear that MS has patents on core parts of the system. People were afraid their investments in software written on top of it would be at risk. Java was always held up as the much safer choice, with a longer legacy, being more open source friendly, with a company behind it that everyone trusted. Of course, companies change hands some times….
I was once told that Sun actually made money off Java, and one of the big sources of revenue was the J2ME market, which is what all those dumb little snake games are written in. Google has undercut that by making a really popular cell phone platform with a version of Java they wrote themselves. It’s still not a good world to be in, where innovation comes with a 10% patent tax. An incredible night of observingLast night was our monthly star party for the Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association. It was just about a perfect August night, not too hot, not too humid, and with very clear skies. Apparently the effort that I’ve been spending on publicity for the group has been paying off, because we got at least a dozen new folks there last night. Once we got enough dark to start seeing things, Bill managed to give a nice tour of the night sky, which people really loved. This hit some of the major high lights of the big dipper, the little dipper, lyra, cygnus, scorpio, sagittarius, the the milky way, which was in quite full force last night. Rick and I managed to effectively hide from the building lights behind a few trees, which left us in a nice dark environment. With so many folks, and Sagittarius in good striking zone, I spent the first half of the night hitting globular clusters and the lagoon nebula over there. My new ultra high contrast filter got it’s first work out on the lagoon nebula, which was striking. As the evening wound on we saw two waves of people head out, until just Rick, Bruce, Ray and I were left. Jupiter popped up to greet us, and we got a few views of that, though through that much atmosphere you were hard pressed to get it above 100x and still see anything. I randomly found (only identified this morning) the Omega Nebula and the Wild Duck Cluster as I was just exploring around Sagittarius. About 12:30 the four us decided to call it a night. I got home at about 1, too wired to go to sleep for the next 45 minutes. It was a great night. Hubble vs. the James Webb in RapWhat could be better and geekier than a rap about Hubble vs. the James Web on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon The probable regional extinction of the little brown batFrom Ars Technica:
This has even managed to get a decent amount of mainstream reporting over the last 2 years. The focus has been on the little brown bat, because we’ve got population numbers going back 30 years, so you can chart trends. Other species of bat also appear to be affected, though there isn’t enough historical data to show exactly what’s happening there. White Nose Syndrome is not really understood, so it’s still not clear what is actually killing off the bats. Coke uses the Chewbacca defenceFirst, this is a really good piece of information, which I don’t want to be buried by the “wha.. wha.. WHA!” moment:
Basically, put down the soda, get yourself a glass of water instead. And now the context for why that popped up in an article:
Really? For the record vitamin water has roughly the same amount of added sugars as a soda of the same size. Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association FlyerThanks to John Lesica with helping on some of the design. Also available as PDF for printing. Two thumbs up for Bloomberg
His speech has shown up many places, this transcription is on Salon. It’s really worth reading in it’s entirety. Scratching an itchApparently I’m now writing a drupal drush module for patch management, and slowly understanding what that entails. I’ve looked around and surprisingly there really isn’t a good solution for this yet. There are a number of solutions for applying other people’s patches that are posted somewhere, but what I really care about is being able to easily keep, and reapply the dozen or so patches I’ve made to drupal modules to make mhvlug.org work. Some of these were due to bugs that don’t seem to be getting fixed any time soon. Some are due to lost of drupal modules not working with PHP 5.3. Regardless of the reason, I’ve apparently found a new itch to scratch, which hopefully isn’t going to take me too long, because I really need to get back to android hacking. |