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A German inventor says he’s found a way to make cheap diesel fuel out of dead cats.

EMI CMG Recalls Switchfoot CD For Copy Protection Settings

Ant Farm Teaches Children About Toil, Death

Billed as “the fun way to teach your kids to accept their miserable fate stoically,” the ant farm retails for $14.95.

Should you ever be abducted by aliens while wearing Location Earth Dog Tags and not returned safely to earth you will be entitled to a full refund of the purchase price

Linux Misses Windows of Opportunity…

The Redmond machine is out in force on this one. A PR blitz about an Aussie company dropping Red Hat for its SAP installation and moving to Windows instead. Talk about out of the frying pan into the fire! If you were going to drop Linux in favour of another Operating System surely you wouldn’t choose Windows? (I have to admit to a bit of personal experience here - I’m currently running SAP on Windows for one of my customers).

Let’s look at a couple of points…

Mr Horton called in Red Hat-recommended contractors to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux and ensure it was configured according to SAP standards, a process which took two weeks. “You have to be using the right certified components, otherwise SAP won’t give you the support. To go through and match everything off was quite tedious,” Mr Horton says.

And you don’t have to do that with a Windows installation of SAP? Oh yes. Of course you do. My mistake. Two weeks to get any platform up to SAP’s standard is pretty good going, Solaris, Linux or Windows.

Aside from the stability issue in this particular case, Mr Horton also found the total cost of ownership included soft costs such as the hard work required to keep Linux up and running. Software updates had to be manually installed to ensure SAP certification. “With the manual process of patching, we were spending about two days a month ensuring that and testing. A lot of people call it a soft cost, because you’ve got IT people anyway but they shouldn’t be spending all day maintaining the system,” Mr Horton says

And again… These soft costs don’t exist on a Windows platform? And manual implementation of patches? Have you not heard of up2date? Our patching cycle is 4 days a month, every month. On top of that the test cycle from the development and regression teams is another 4 days a month. That makes 8 days a month. And we have a very pragmatic approach to patching.

Kicking out Linux for Windows because you have a stability issue is fair enough, if you really can’t fix the stability issue (but you have to ask if they really tried). But citing those other reasons is just PR garbage. I’m no Red Hat fan myself, but talking about manual implementation of patches, soft costs, TCO and system certification from app vendors is utter tosh. Anyway. Here endeth the rant. I’ll just leave you with a quote from the SAP consultant currently working through our latest “insufficient resources” problem:

I’d be wary of changing anything which reduces the amount of RAM available to SAP. I reckon the only real solution will be a decent enterprise standard o/s.

…to hope you players aren’t picked for the test squad? I’m just not sure Glos can handle another season of international call ups and the related disturbances and injuries. We’re looking good so far - I’d hate to see the momentum lost…

Over at b3ta they’ve been playing the “people with stupid names” gag for months (and months and months and …) but this one really has to take the biscuit.

Vasectomy sir? Please meet Dr Dick Chopp, your surgeon.

I guess it would be inevitable that this would happen, but the speed with which it happened and the crass purchase attempts make it a very modern tale…

News wire photo of Katrina relief card causes widespread online fraud.

Found at Raw Feed

Music exec tells Mac and Linux users to stop whinging about DRM and buy a proper CD player. Nice. Well done. Well thought through, that one. I’m sure his colleagues are very proud.

Not your usual Monday morning fare I must admit, but well worth getting a cup of tea and putting aside 10 minutes to read this and get really really cross. You have been warned.