28 Apr 2008
Newlyweds jailed after brawl at Pittsburgh-area hotel

What witty comment could do this justice?

AP - A newlywed couple spent the night in separate jail cells — she in her wedding gown — after police said they brawled with each other, then members of another wedding party, at a suburban Pittsburgh hotel.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

21:38 /Humor | 0 comments | permanent link

Islam on the table

Ya know, I find the Islamic (and Jewish) restriction on pork silly. But what's instructive about this article is how it details the implementation of a government policy, in this case a religious one, without actual reference to that policy's objectives. They're not banning pork, they're intentionally regulating it out of existence.

We're seeing more of the same here in the US - although the policy objective isn't religious, it's commercial.

New laws may spell Turkish pork industry's demise

(link) [BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]

06:21 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

Uighurs struggle in world reshaped by Chinese influx

It's not just Tibet - the Chinese seem to have learned well from Russian, American and Australian treatment of native peoples.

In China's far west, the Muslim ethnic group finds itself relegated to menial jobs. Chinese officials also restrict religious practice and use of their language in schools.

(link) [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories]

06:03 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

IBM's Inexpensive Notes/Domino Push Against MS

I have to use Lotus Bloats at work - and if I were the IT guy there, they'd have to pay us $100 per seat to get me to adopt it. I never thought I'd pine for the halcyon days of Outlook and Exchange server until I ran into this abomination.

Deviant writes "Speaking as an IT consultant, the one big gap in the Linux stack is in messaging / collaboration. MS Outlook with Exchange is a fine product on which many businesses truly rely, and it is almost impossible to match on Linux — server or desktop. The one competitor to MS in this space has been IBM's Lotus Notes / Domino, which has always had the general reputation of being expensive, bloated, and unfriendly. I certainly wouldn't have considered it for the small businesses that we usually sell on MS's SBS server product. That is why I was truly surprised to hear about the new Domino Express Licensing and Notes 8. This is a product that has native server and client versions for both Mac and Linux. Notes 8, now written in Eclipse, also includes an integrated office suite, Lotus Symphony. This could conceivably let a user do all of their work in one application. And you can now license the server and client components together for as low as $100/user. It's packaged for companies of 1,000 seats or fewer. Is this the silver bullet to take out the entire MS stack — server, client, and Office? Or will IBM drop the ball yet again?"

(link) [Slashdot]

05:50 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link