Eric Hartwell's InfoWeb

Monday, April 25, 2005

Attention, extremely wealthy geeks: Life-Sized X Wing on eBay. [via Dave Barry's Blog 4/25/2005] When fully assembled the X-Wing measures 28 feet long, 20 feet wide, and about 10 and a half feet tall. Constructed from fiberglass, wood, and plastic, all placed over a steel frame, weighing 2000 lbs. This particular X-wing has spent the last several years hanging from the ceiling of the FAO Schwartz toy store in Orlando, Florida. It is in very good shape, and would be the ultimate centerpiece to any Star Wars collection. Ends April 30, 18:00:00 PDT Note: Rebel pilot not included. Free US domestic shipping if you "Buy-It-Now" for US $85,000.00. For bids of US $15,000 or more, eBay requires a valid credit card.

OpenOffice Team Wants IBM Contribution. [vunet 4/25/2005] OpenOffice is a suite of productivity tools for text editing, spreadsheets and drawings. Sun acquired the product in 1999 and released the code in 2000 under an open source licence. It uses the code as the foundation of StarOffice, a commercial version of the suite. Sun is still the largest contributor, with about 100 developers. There are roughly 600 active contributors, comprising individual coders and people working for commercial developers such as Novell and Red Hat. Sun's OpenOffice project leader has gone public to shame IBM, which sells OpenOffice as part of its Workplace suite, into donating developer time to the project. "IBM has refrained from contributing to the development. It has thereby declined to participate in the open source environment," he said. Neener neener.