Big blue wants a handout but still wants to dish out tough love

Slashdot has a story about IBM (big blue) canning thousands of people in a city where taxpayers paid $45 million not to cut additional jobs. What's amazing about the story is that IBM is asking for a bailout and still planning on cutting those jobs. I can just hear execs moaning "we're just cutting un-profitable ..." but they've already been paid a couple of times specifically to keep people on the payroll. It sounds like a big money grab to me.

Fire spreading...

It's become pretty clear to me that Open Source software has caught on, it's become something like Microsoft's viral agent portrayal, but not in a bad way. The other day a professor I once studied under asked me about OpenOffice. This morning I was surfing and came across GamePC which features Firefox and Thunderbird as an important selling point of their machines... pretty cool if you ask me!

The second CPU is in!

I got the second 200MHz CPU for my Sun Ultra 2 last night. When I plugged it in this morning Gentoo automatically recognized the CPU and sported a second Gentoo console logo while booting. The speed is impressive so far. I bet with a little tuning this baby would beat some of the 400MHz boxes we have around the shop.