CWmike writes "Microsoft will buy and resell up to another $100 million worth of enterprise support subscriptions for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system. Two years ago, Microsoft agreed to buy and resell $240 million worth of the vouchers. Susan Hauser, general manager of strategic partnerships and licensing at Microsoft, confirmed that some of the subscription vouchers were sold to customers for less than face value, though none were given away for free."

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In this week's Disagree Mail, I try to show the range of messages I get. It's not all angry or insane, sometimes it's sent to us for no apparent reason. We start off a little mad, slip into a whole bunch of crazy and finish with someone who has a complaint about racism at his favorite restaurant. Read below to get started.

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Josh Skillings writes "The author, Chad Fowler, draws upon his experiences as a software engineer, a team leader over a group of Indian developers, and as a jazz musician, to describe 52 ways or tips that will help you to become a more valuable employee. These tips are described in two or three pages each, and are usually illustrated by a practical example or story. The tips are well thought-out, well-explained and make sense. Chad draws upon the open source movement as well, highlighting ways that contributing to and learning from open source can improve your career. These tips gave me greater respect and appreciation for the open source movement in general." Read on for the rest of Josh's review.

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caffiend666 writes "In order to abate the massive vibration issues of their new Ares I spacecraft, NASA is installing shock absorbers. 'The plan is to install 16 canisters in the bottom of the rocket with 100-pound weights attached to springs. Battery-powered motors will move the weights up and down to stop vibrations. Those are essentially remote-controlled shock absorbers, said Garry Lyles, who headed the team of NASA engineers tackling the shaking problem.' So, when the spaceship is a rocking, don't come a knocking?"

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JagsLive writes "After lots of complaints about iPhone 3G connection issues, Apple released a firmware update Monday with hopes it would fix the issues. But early reports suggest it didn't work as planned. Complaints have included dropped calls, abrupt network switches, poor reception, and service interruptions. Apple declined to offer details about its iPhone 2.0.1 update, other than saying it included 'bug fixes.' However, comments in Apple's support forum say plenty about the latest attempt to rectify poor user experiences. In fact, the update seems to be causing new issues, apparently interfering with the GPS function, among others."

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SkeptOlympics writes "A new chapter in the ongoing controversy surrounding China's women's gymnastics team opened today, as search engine hacker stryde.hax found surviving copies of official registration documents issued by China's General Administration of Sport of China. The incriminating documents, expunged by censors from the official site and from Google's document cache, still appear in the document translation cache of Chinese search giant Baidu, here (1) and here (2), showing the age of one of China's gold medal winning gymnasts to be 14 instead of 16, the minimum age for competition presented on her government-issued passport. Now that official government documentation is available, how long will the IOC be able to keep a lid on this scandal?" I imagine the answer is "Forever."

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whisper_jeff writes "Due to some potential copyright issues, The Watchmen might be delayed, or worse. It seems that Fox claims it still owns copyrights which would prevent Warner Bros from releasing the movie. US District Court Judge Gary Feess decided that Fox had enough of a case that he's willing to hear things out. The geek in me hopes that it will be resolved quickly and the movie will hit theaters on time."

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Davide Marney passes along an AP story about the thousands of voting machines gathering dust in warehouses across the country after states such as California, Ohio, and Florida have banned their use. Many of these machines cost $3.5K to $5K each. Local election boards are struggling to find ways to recover any of the cost of the machines, or even to recycle them. The picture in Ohio is the most confusing, as multiple court cases limit the state's options and result in a situation in which the discredited machines will nevertheless be used in the presidential election coming up in November. The state's new (Democratic) attorney general has just issued a rule banning the practice of election workers taking the machines home with them the night before elections.

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FireStormZ writes "Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror, confounding the notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals. It had been thought only four species of apes, bottlenose dolphins, and Asian elephants shared the human ability to recognize their own bodies in a mirror. But German scientists reported on Tuesday that magpies, a species with a brain structure very different from mammals, could also identify themselves. It had been thought that the neocortex brain area found in mammals was crucial to self-recognition. Yet birds, which last shared a common ancestor with mammals 300 million years ago, don't have a neocortex, suggesting that higher cognitive skills can develop in other ways."

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Anti-Globalism recommends a posting up at O'Reilly's ONLamp on reasons that some companies are turning away from Perl. "[In one company] [m]anagement have started to refer to Perl-based systems as 'legacy' and to generally disparage it. This attitude has seeped through to non-technical business users who have started to worry if developers mention a system that is written in Perl. Business users, of course, don't want nasty old, broken Perl code. They want the shiny new technologies. I don't deny at all that this company (like many others) has a large amount of badly written and hard-to-maintain Perl code. But I maintain that this isn't directly due to the code being written in Perl. Its because the Perl code has developed piecemeal over the last ten or so years in an environment where there was no design authority.. Many of these systems date back to this company's first steps onto the Internet and were made by separate departments who had no interaction with each other. Its not really a surprise that the systems don't interact well and a lot of the code is hard to maintain."

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When legitimate scientists have conducted studies on BPA, it is consistently linkedto obesity, developmental problems, risk for heart attack, and breast andprostate cancer. Even if there was the slightest chance that BPA was dangerous the FDA should've banned it from plastics, especially BABY BOTTLES. What could be worse for a baby ...

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Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro have officially announced that they're writing The Hobbit and its follow-up themselves. I never thought so much buzz could come from an announcement about writing, but that's what happens when it's The Hobbit! There's not a single thing to be worried about here.

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We also wanted to make sure we selected a partner that was capable of moving rapidly so our members could benefit from the maximum potential rebates and solar incentives before they decline or expire.

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Lets explore some of Mother Nature?s most colorful works. The kaleidoscope of colors presented in this series of spectacular lake images, encapsulate the incredible natural beauty of enclosed expanses of water.

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In a sharp turnaround, Sen. John McCain has opened a 5-point lead on Democrat Obama and is seen as a stronger manager of the economy. Obama's support among Democrats fell 9% this month to 74%. He slipped among Catholics, born-again Christians, women, independents. Obama's support among voters between 18 and 29 slipped 12% to 52%.

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Think smoking is bad for you? Try just breathing. Louisiana scientists have discovered a group of previously undetected air pollutants that when inhaled exposes the average person to 300 times more free radicals than that of one cigarette in a day.

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Jamaica's Usain Bolt added the 200m crown to his Olympic 100m title in a new world record time of 19.30 seconds in Beijing. The 21-year-old, who won the 100m title in a world record of 9.69 secs, powered past the field to cross the line and break Michael Johnson's record.

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As the Beijing Olympics wind down, so do the runs of baseball and softball as Olympic medal sports. Although the two sports won?t be on the Olympic schedule for the 2012 Games in London, they won?t be alone; throughout the years the IOC has slashed a number of sports from the official Olympic program.

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Reviews are in: You've seen this legendary super-car in the making before, but now watch the street beast's moves as a civilized track machine with tech-heavy video, and a dazzling two thumbs up.

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HBOS boss conned

Updated Identity fraudsters have claimed the prize scalp of the chief exec of HBOS bank.?

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Silver lining meets cloud

With cloud services losing their 24x7 luster, Hyperic is today expected to step up with its second service probing for potential weaknesses.?

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Court throws P2P users to the Davenport Lyons

The copyright ambulance-chasers at Davenport Lyons have a High Court order demanding 25,000 UK ISP subscribers' names and addresses, it emerged today.?

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Good news for Atom. Bad news for Core?

IDF Worldwide shipments of mobile computers will match those of desktops this year - and it's all thanks to the Asus Eee PC and its ilk.?

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20,000 applications, one open phone

Olympics aside, summer 2008 will be remembered for at least two other reasons. It will be seen as a time when the noise over Linux as a platform for mobile devices reached a crescendo. Second: it marked Debian's fifteenth anniversary.?

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Taste.2.0

Last Sunday morning in Toronto there was a huge explosion at a propane storage depot which resulted in two deaths and 12,000 people being evacuated.?

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HSDPA, GPS, Wi-Fi on board

It's only a day later than anticipated, but Palm has now launched the Treo Pro. Available SIM-free or from Vodafone, the new-look smartphone is somewhere between the Centro and the iPhone 3G.?

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We don't know where you are

Mobile broadband over 3G may be able to offer speeds to compete with ADSL, but it can't offer access to the Olympics - at least not from the BBC, who are blocking mobile users from video streams of the event to comply with IOC rulings.?

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Deep hot wet cracks = green dreams

Google, the company which has conscripted everyone on the internet to be its Web 2.0 free-content providers, has decided to give something back. The firm will spend $10m - almost a thousandth of a year's ad revenues - to kickstart geothermal power.?

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'Hello, hello, can you hear me? Give me £200,000'

Regulators today signalled a crackdown on scammers who use 070 numbers to con people into calling premium lines in the belief they will be charged at the normal mobile rate.?

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JPPF is a computational grid framework for Java focused on performance and ease of use. It provides a set of tools and APIs to enable the parallelization of CPU intensive applications, and distribute their execution over a network of heterogenous nodes. It features platform independence thanks to Java 1.5, does not require you to deploy your application classes to a server, scales up to millions of nodes, has a built-in fail-over mechanism on all the framework's components, and has a monitoring and administration GUI tool to enable remote monitoring of the server health and server shutdown/restart operations.

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License: The Apache License 2.0

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Changes:
Nodes can now be restarted or shut down remotely from the administration console or via the API. Tasks can be executed locally by the client, with automatic load-balancing between local and remote execution. The node security policy can be downloaded from the server for easier deployment. The nodes collect the CPU time used by the tasks.

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system-config-printer configures a CUPS server. It uses the CUPS API (bound to Python with pycups) to do this. The communication with the server is performed using IPP. As a result, it is equally able to configure a remote CUPS server as a local one.

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License: GNU General Public License v2

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Changes:
Several bugfixes. User interface improvements for job authentication and selecting a PPD for a new printer.

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Fakeroot-ng runs a program while fooling it into thinking it is running with root privileges. When the program does something that only root can do (e.g. create a device file), fakeroot-ng emulates the appropriate system calls so that the program gets a consistent view of its actions. Unlike the original fakeroot, fakeroot-ng uses the ptrace interface, which means that it will (soon) support emulating chroot jails properly.

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License: GNU General Public License v2

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Changes:
This release allows attaching to an existing state from a new invocation. There are speedups in the build system and other improvements.

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Directory Recursive Files is a Java library that finds all files in a root directory and all its sub-folders. It is very easy to use from other Java projects or programs.

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PhpGedView parses GEDCOM 5.5 genealogy files and displays them on the Internet in formats and charts. It is designed to be a tool for online collaboration. All it requires to run is a PHP-enabled Web server and a Gedcom file.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This is a maintenance release that includes many bugfixes and important security updates. It is highly recommended that all sites upgrade.

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GTK, which stands for the Gimp ToolKit, is a library for creating graphical user interfaces. It is designed to be small and efficient, but still flexible enough to allow the programmer freedom in the interfaces created. GTK provides some unique features over standard widget libraries.

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License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

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Changes:
Many bugs were fixed. Translations were updated.

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red-flameO is a red IceWM theme. It works well with several GTK themes, and focuses on usability (e.g. the frames are big enough to resize windows easily).

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
Unnecessary images have been deleted. The collapse and expand buttons have been exchanged. White edge-frames have been removed. The close button has been replaced with parts of the nicer ones from N-Icedesert. The left icon in the titlebar has been activated, and the background color adjusted. The input color has been changed. The ubuntuusers icon has been replaced due to copyright issues.

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GNU SIP Witch is a pure SIP-based office telephone call server that supports generic phone system features like call forwarding, hunt groups and call distribution, call coverage and ring groups, holding, and call transfer, as well as offering SIP specific capabilities such as presence and messaging. It supports secure telephone extensions for making calls over the Internet, and intercept/decrypt-free peer-to-peer audio and video extensions. It is not a SIP proxy, a multi-protocol telephone server, or an IP-PBX, and does not try to emulate Asterisk, FreeSWITCH, or Yate.

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License: GNU General Public License v3

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Changes:
An RTP proxy engine API in the core library was started. New plugins were started for support of residential VoIP subscriber gateways and transparent RTP proxy for supporting secure calling when behind NAT by peer interconnect classification. Support for reinvite and SIP transaction relaying was added. CGI extraction of call logs was added.

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Cyan Secure Web Proxy Server is a carrier grade, high performance Internet filtering proxy server for Linux. It includes scalable (user/group/host) Web filter and virus scan utilities for blocking malicious applications at the gateway. It has an advanced URL database, authentication support (Active Directory, LDAP, NTLM), SSL Interception, easy deployment, and remote administration.

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License: Other/Proprietary License with Free Trial

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Changes:
An IP cache for NTLM authentication was implemented. User and Group reload handling was modified. Problems with Active Directory authentication were fixed. Problems with non-SSL data tunneling were fixed.

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Siege is a regression test and benchmark utility. It can stress test a single URL with a user defined number of simulated users, or it can read many URLs into memory and stress them simultaneously. The program reports the total number of hits recorded, bytes transferred, response time, concurrency, and return status. Siege supports HTTP/1.0 and 1.1 protocols, GET and POST directives, cookies, transaction logging, and basic authentication. Its features are configurable on a per user basis.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This release fixes a bug that prevented digest authentication from being set on a realm by realm basis.

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Artist Joseph Griffith, whose work draws from fantasy and mythology, has also turned his attention to one of America's most significant historical moments: "I painted this for the 225th anniversary of the Battle of Yorktown when George Washington and the Continentals traunched the British. The county would not dignify it with a response, however, George Washington's Mount Vernon estate kindly wrote me an e-mail saying they would 'pass it along to the staff'."


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Your unborn child as produce - You'll never look at chard the same way again.


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Bar Surya in London was the first. Now Club Watt in Rotterdam is recycling dancers' energy. Brought to you by the Sustainable Dance Club.


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It's the law: "No person who has attained the age of sixteen years shall take any migratory waterfowl unless at the time of such taking he carries on his person an unexpired Federal migratory-bird hunting and conservation stamp". The Federal Duck Stamp turned 75 this year.
What to do after the season is over? Well, there are collectors.

More history on the duck stamp.

Wanna hunt ducks? Buy this stamp. Wanna collect duck stamps? This commemorative pane may be more to your liking.

No, I do not work for the US Postal Service

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Le Bernardin chef Eric Ripert's got a blog where he serves up demos of recipes he makes in his toaster oven.


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Spammers helping with the New Orleans recovery efforts.
New Orleans has found a novel use for the massive database used by Valassis Communications' RedPlum direct-mail operation. Normally used to send promotional circulars to virtually every household in the U.S., it's now being used to track the speed of recovery in the Crescent City.

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Some of the female Chinese gymnasts are apparently under-age. It wasn't their skulls, their chins or their eyes that gave them away: it was the internet.


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When art imitates life. The Onion once again.....


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Worried about food prices? Don't be, if you've got capital! You can lease land from starving countries like Sudan to ease your own food problems. This ain't Food Force (previously), but the gamesmanship (via) is underway (pdf). On the bright side, let them eat lobster!


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Selections from H.P. Lovecraft's brief tenure as a Whitman's Sampler copywriter.


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