ankurb – Page 492 – Ankur Banerjee's personal blog

Novell could be banned from selling Linux: group – Yahoo! News

Novell is now officially in big trouble for its deal with Microsoft. It may have helped it financially initially, but it earned the ire of the open source community. Now, the Free Software Foundation is mulling blocking Novell from using its code in future versions.

That’s not the end of the road for Novell, since it can still keep on developing on its own, but then that costs R&D money, loads of it.

Two possible scenarios come up. If FSF succeeds, then Novell is smothered, and goes bankrupt / is bought by Microsoft (they’ll call it ‘bailing out’). Thus Microsoft will win with its ‘Embrace, Extend, Exterminate’ approach.

Or Novell might actually spend on R&D and create its own breed of Linux, which effectively splits the open source community. And if other major players like Red Hat start doing that too, then Linux is cooked – divided into multitudes of fragmented pieces.

I’d initially given a bit of cautious support to the Novell-Microsoft deal, but now it certainly seems that it was just an extension of Microsft’s FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Destruction) plans. It’s not too late for Novell to back out, give up the money guys, and come back to pure open source.

Useless Facts from Da Vinci Code

Now that it’s gone, I realize how much I really valued it. Mom made popcorn, and I thought, rather glumly to meself that DVC would’ve been perfect to go with it.
Anyways, here are some useless facts on the great movie with the greatest score:

There is a gargoyle spied by Sophie inside Westminster Abbey that is modelled after Ron Howard’s face.
Shipped to cinemas as “Artistry” in three cans.
A plot element in a mystery story that functions as a false clue by drawing attention away from the correct solution is called a “red herring”. Bishop Aringarosa is a red herring in The Da Vinci Code. This is hinted by the fact that “aringa rossa” means “red herring” in Italian.
Brian Grazer and Ron Howard received an invite from French President Jaques Chirac. They expected a five-minute photo call. Instead they spent an hour in conversation and were told to speak to him if they had problems getting filming in the Louvre. Chirac suggested Reno should have a pay rise and that his daughter’s best friend, an actress, should be cast as Sophie Neveu.
When Teabing is describing the passage in the lost gospel of Mary Magdalene, he is interrupted before he can finish quoting a line about Jesus kissing Magdelene. During an interview on NPR’s “Day to Day,” religious historian Elaine Pagels (whose book on the gnostic gospels was a source for Dan Brown’s novel) said that the gospel is physically broken at exactly the place that Teabing stops talking, so he would be unable to quote it any further anyway.