Teen Creates Fusion

In the basement of his parents' Oakland Township home, tucked away in an area most aren't privy to see, Thiago is exhausting his love of physics on a project that has taken him more than two years and 1,000 hours to research and build -- a large, intricate machine that , on a small scale, creates nuclear fusion.

Nuclear fusion -- when atoms are combined to create energy -- is "kind of like the holy grail of physics," he said.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061119/NEWS03/611190639

Novell's Honeymoon With Microsoft Over

It sounds like Microsoft's spin of the IP patent deal has finally sunk in with Novell... Come on, Novell -- they've screwed companies bigger than you over in their sleep. Talk to IBM, Lotus, or Apple. They were bigger, smarter, and faster than Microsoft, and the moment they made agreements with Redmond it was just about over. Dos? Stolen. Spreadsheets? Stolen. Wingui? Stolen.
Besides, even if you survive the deal, your street cred's over. And that's something that even Microsoft can't buy.
Here's what Novell had to say:

"We disagree with the recent statements made by Microsoft on the topic of Linux and patents. Importantly, our agreement with Microsoft is in no way an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property. When we entered the patent cooperation agreement with Microsoft, Novell did not agree or admit that Linux or any other Novell offering violates Microsoft patents.

Our stance on software patents is unchanged by the agreement with Microsoft. We want to remind the community of Novell's commitment to, and prior actions in support of, furthering the interests of Linux and open source, and creating an environment of free and open innovation. We have a strong patent portfolio and we have leveraged that portfolio for the benefit of the open source community."
http://www.novell.com/linux/microsoft/community_open_letter.html

“We see it doing its thing, starting to fight against ordinary gravity,” Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute said about the antigravity force, known as dark energy. He is the leader of a team of “dark energy prospectors,” as he calls them, who peered back nine billion years with the Hubble and were able to discern the nascent effects of antigravity. The group reported their observations at a news conference yesterday and in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/17/science/space/17dark.html?em&ex=1163998800&en=f02de71136ca5dd5&ei=5087%0A

Star Trek Inspirational Posters

My fave: "Captian Kirk -- I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am."

Also, more here. 

http://echosphere.net/star_trek_insp/star_trek_insp.html

Gosling on Open Sourcing Java

"The source code is being open sourced, but the process of defining the spec is still the Java Community Process. In addition, there are massive test suites, and we will do an immense amount of testing. We expect that people who care about reliability and compatibility with the spec will use our version.

The source code is being open sourced, but the process of defining the spec is still the Java Community Process.

You know, most people in the open-source world who use open-source software don't actually do builds themselves -- those people just download the binaries. And so we expect that the big enterprise people will just do that, and we will certainly be providing binaries that have been through full industrial-strength QA, that have been through all the conformance testing.

So it shouldn't give anybody any concerns as far as fragmentation. We're not just going to let random people check random code in. Just like every other open-source project, we will end up with a set of rules for who's allowed to check in a lot. Everything will get checked and rechecked and debugged."
http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/gosling_os1_qa.html

Managing IT

Executives need to stop looking at IT projects as technology installations and start looking at them as periods of organizational change that they have a responsibility to manage.
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbrsa/en/issue/0611/article/R0611J.jhtml;jsessionid=ZI5G4OQONIVHKAKRGWCB5VQBKE0YOISW?type=F

Communication

It isn't often you get something from your boss that makes you think. I got this tidbit in my MOR meeting a couple of weeks ago and it's been drifting through my mind.
He asked me how many times do you have to communicate something before people get it. Take a guess.
I bet you're wrong. 13 times. Thirteen freakin' times.
Think about that the next time you're rolling out a new app or process. Sheesh.