Cody Taylor

Clouds are such big Linux news these days that, in the physical world, it would be raining by now. Or at least heavily overcast.

notthepainter notes the passing of the woman who, as an 11-year-old-girl, named Pluto. “Frozen and lonely, Planet X circled the far reaches of the solar system awaiting discovery and a name. It got one thanks to an 11-year-old British girl named Venetia Burney, an enthusiast of the planets and classical myth. On March 14, 1930, the day newspapers reported that the long-suspected ‘trans-Neptunian body’ had been photographed for the first time, she proposed to her well-connected grandfather that it be named Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld. Venetia Phair, as she became by marriage, died April 30 in her home in Banstead, in the county of Surrey, England. She was 90. … More vexing to Mrs. Phair was the persistent notion that she had taken the name from the Disney character. ‘It has now been satisfactorily proven that the dog was named after the planet, rather than the other way around,’ she told the BBC. ‘So, one is vindicated.’ ” Venetia’s great-uncle Henry, who was a housemaster at Eton, had successfully proposed that the two dwarf moons of Mars be named Phobos and Deimos.

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pfleming writes “Microsoft quietly, or not so quietly, raised some cheap cash in bond sales yesterday. For a company that already has a huge cash war chest and doesn’t carry debt, what is the incentive to sell nearly billion in bonds? From the article: ‘Microsoft is sitting on billion in cash, so the company doesn’t need the bond proceeds “unless they have something big in mind,” says Reena Aggarwal, professor of finance at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.'”

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