Bad news reported in a message to the PLUG list:
Date: 2006-02-27 13:54 +1100
To: plug
Subject: [plug] leon brooksIt is my sad duty to inform you all that Leon Brooks had a car accident on Saturday night and has severe head injuries and is currently in ICU.
Further details are sketchy at this stage.
🙁
Leon, I hope you make a speedy and thorough recovery. Get well soon.
Via Linux Australia
From the “my brain hurts” department..
New Scientist magazine is reporting that:
[..] researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have improved on the original design and built a non-running quantum computer that really works
Yes, you read that correctly.. they’ve built a quantum computer that doesn’t do anything but provides the correct answer.
This is from something called the Zeno Effect that has been exploited here to allow a photon to be influenced on a quantum level with a non-operational quantum computing program, but (through the constant measurement inherent in the Zeno Effect) not be allowed to actually execute the program. Through this influence the answer appears, even though you’ve never run the program.
One of the developers said:
“It is very bizarre that you know your computer has not run but you also know what the answer is,”
and
“A non-running computer produces fewer errors,”
I couldn’t put it better myself! 😎
Here’s a nice find courtesy of The Register, the UK Royal Air Force’s Battle of Britain Memorial Flight’s Avro Lancaster “The City of Lincoln” caught on Google Earth flying over Huntingdon.
Just installed the Structured Blogging plugin for WordPress (version v1.0pre13) which provides hidden, machine readable metadata for certain type of blog posts (like film reviews) as well as the usual human readable content. Say “hello” to the Semantic Web folks..
As a test I’ve re-published my review of Kenny, below (original here), with it as a comparison, got to say it makes it look quite professional!
Well well well, here’s an interesting turnup in the SCO vs IBM case that’s been dragging on and on for years.
SCO finally had to submit a list of what they were accusing IBM of, with specificity,and did so with a list of 294 alleged misdeeds that they filed under seal, so the rest of the world couldn’t see. Obviously they’d gotten fed up with the world pulling the rest of their previous allegations apart.
But now IBM have hit back, they’ve filed a motion in the court to strike 201 of those 294 allegations immediately because, surprise surprise, SCO give no evidence at all for them. Apparently they don’t cite any lines of code from Linux, AIX, Dynix or System V to support those particular 201 allegations. What makes it worse from SCOs point of view is that IBM wrote to them on the 5th December 2005 pointing this out and giving them the opportunity to fix it, but they ignored the warning. So IBM has done the only thing that they could in the circumstance and asked the court to strike these items, mentioning in passing that SCOs unresponsiveness to flag that it’s probably not worth ordering them to do anything as they’ve already been asked and had over 2 months to provide extra details.
The sorts of things SCO is up to are time wasting tricks like this (to pick a random example):
Item Nos. 271 and 294 of the Final Disclosures illustrate the problem. Item No. 271 claims that “AIX and Dynix/ptx patented technologies, based on UNIX System V, were improperly released for the benefit of, and use by, the Linux development community in developing Linux.†SCO does not identify a single version, file or line of Unix System V, AIX, Dynix or Linux technology that IBM is alleged to have misused. Instead, SCO merely attaches 34 patents. None of these 34 patents lists any versions, files or lines of code. There is, therefore, no way of telling what, if any, Unix System V, AIX, Dynix or Linux technology SCO contends was misused.
But this is probably only the first in a series of blows to SCO, as if the court does rule that SCO have not produced any particularised details for these allegations as the court had ordered (several times) and strike these allegations then IBM can start on those where they’ve got some idea about what SCO is prattling on about and then it’ll get interesting when we see what they then do to defend themselves.
There is already something about this foreshadowed in a footnote to the filing where IBM say:
In Item No. 204, SCO provides a comparison of System V source code and Dynix source code to support the unremarkable, and uncontested, proposition that the Dynix operating system contains certain code modified or derived from System V source code; neither party contests the fact that IBM (through Sequent) had a valid license to include System V source code in Dynix. In fact, as noted above, SCO makes no claim of misuse of the material identified in Item No. 204. (See supra note 1.)
Truly a Homer Simpson moment.. D’oh!
Note to self for next time I can’t remember how to get spacers to work in Typo3 menus when using the htmlcssstyling front end extension..
Need to edit typo3conf/ext/htmlcssstyling/static/setup.txt and add to each of the menu sections:
# Activate Spacer
SPC = 1
SPC.doNotShowLink = 0
SPC.doNotLinkIt = 1
SPC.allWrap =|
It doesn’t seem to work if you add it into the TS setup sections of the templates. To be fair it does say in the docs that:
Spacer’ is only meaningfull if your frontend navigation is programmed to use it. In this case it does not represent a page with content but is intended to be a non-clickable placeholder in the navigation.
Which, presumably, is precisely what the above code is doing in that setup.txt file.
In their latest brainwave on how to pry money out of people fed up with paying for upgrades they don’t want, Microsoft apparently are going to make the new version of Halo for PC only work on Vista.
Of course, this may also require people to upgrade their computers too as it is rumoured to require a lot more beef than XP does, though Microsoft are being very cagey about what they are for now. However, both AMD and Intel provide suggested processors. Then you’ve got to have at least 512MB RAM (though some would argue that XP really needs that) and a Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) capable card, for which nVidia, ATI and Intel provide specs. Also check out this blog post by Steven Roddis who’s come up with a list of the individual specs.
This is via Jabber from Jeremy – a very cool work in progress of a Human Computer Interface (HCI) called Multi-Touch Interaction Research. They’ve got a really nice movie up in MPEG1 or Quicktime which you can drool over..
Andrew seems to be having problems with his RSS feed – a word of advice mate, try FeedValidator.org as that seems to show quite a few problems with your feed..
Mind you, at least p.l.o.a is still picking up your feed, although they parse my validated RSS feed the stories aren’t appearing on the site for some reason – time to ping that admins I think!
Fun fun fun! Now integrated more plugins for various bits of neatness such as the WordPress Gallery2 Plugin that lets me both integrate my gallery2 installation into WordPress and to easily put piccies from Gallery2 into blog postings – like this..
Neat eh ? :-)Â Â It’s also doing the random image in the sidebar on the right..
I’ve also been playing around with another of Rich’s plugins – this time for the automatic generation of Technorati tags so this is a bit of a test to see if it’ll do what it says on the can..