Monthly Archives: August 2007

SCO, Novell, Sun and OpenSolaris

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Back in 2004 Sun’s then CEO, Scott McNealy, stated in an interview with Jem Matzan (NewsForge reprint) about CDDL’ing OpenSolaris:

We had to pay SCO more money so we could open the code — I couldn’t say anything about that at the time, but now I can tell you that we paid them that license fee to expand our rights to the code

However, now that Judge Kimball has ruled that Novell actually owns the copyrights and not SCO I presume it’s now up to Novell to decide whether or not that deal is still valid, probably at least partly dependant on whether or not SCO can find the cash to pony up the dues on it they illegally withheld from Novell.

Could be interesting given Novell’s stake in Linux.

Shuttle Endeavour damaged by falling ice

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This doesn’t sound good..

An analysis of images taken during Wednesday’s lift-off in Cape Canaveral, Florida, shows that the shuttle’s underbelly was hit by a piece of ice – rather than foam from its external fuel tank as previously believed, he said. The impact left what appeared to be a 19 square centimetre gouge near the hatch of one of the shuttle’s landing gears.

Thermal tile damage on shuttle Endeavour, BBC.

Hopefully carrying teachers on the shuttle isn’t bad luck..

Editing Reality – Dutch creationists distort David Attenborough

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An interesting article from the Bad Astronomy website:

The latest outrage from fundamentalist reality-deniers comes to us from the Evangelische Omroep, or Evangelical Broadcasters, a Dutch TV broadcaster of fundamentalist religious propaganda content. Not content to simply lie about science the way creationists do in America, they have gone on to the next (il)logical step: editing out the bits they don’t like.

David Attenborough is responsible for some of the best nature documentaries of all time. EO bought the rights to broadcast his excellent show, “Life of Mammals” (I’ve seen some of it, and, as is always the case, it’s just top of the line stuff). But of course, the documentary makes all sorts of horrifying references to evolution, so the EO decided to simply re-edit the show. They excised whole chunks, put up different titles, and basically destroyed any relevance to what the show is about: reality.

There is a YouTube clip showing examples of some of the cuts.

(Via Alec)

A sign of what’s to come ?

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Given the state of the drought in Australia, perhaps this is what we have to look forward to if things getting worse here water wise..

The water supply to residents of the Turkish capital Ankara has been reduced to two days on, two days off because of a severe drought. The water level in reservoirs supplying the city has dropped to less than 5% of capacity, as the country suffers one of its driest years on record.