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🔗 California 🔗 Companies 🔗 Technology 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Electronics

The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation was completed on January 27, 2010. Significantly, Oracle, previously only a software vendor, now owned both hardware and software product lines from Sun (e.g. SPARC Enterprise and Java, respectively).

A major issue of the purchase was that Sun was a major competitor to Oracle, raising many concerns among antitrust regulators, open source advocates, customers, and employees. The EU Commission delayed the acquisition for several months over concerns of Oracle's plans for MySQL, Sun's competitor to the Oracle Database. The commission finally approved the takeover, apparently pressured by the United States to do so, according to a WikiLeaks cable released in September 2011.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Books 🔗 Military history/Middle Eastern military history 🔗 Military history/Military historiography

The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (French: La Guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu lieu) is a collection of three short essays by Jean Baudrillard published in the French newspaper Libération and British paper The Guardian between January and March 1991.

While the author acknowledges that the events and violence of what has been called the Gulf War took place, he asks if the events that took place were really as they were presented, and could they be called a war? The title is a reference to the play The Trojan War Will Not Take Place by Jean Giraudoux (in which characters attempt to prevent what the audience knows is inevitable).

🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Glass

🔗 Film 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Film/Filmmaking 🔗 Fictional characters

Alan Smithee (also Allen Smithee) is an official pseudonym used by film directors who wish to disown a project. Coined in 1968 and used until it was formally discontinued in 2000, it was the sole pseudonym used by members of the Directors Guild of America (DGA) when a director, dissatisfied with the final product, proved to the satisfaction of a guild panel that they had not been able to exercise creative control over a film. The director was also required by guild rules not to discuss the circumstances leading to the movie or even to acknowledge being the project's director.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Volcanoes 🔗 Geology 🔗 Weather 🔗 Weather/Non-tropical storms

A volcanic winter is a reduction in global temperatures caused by volcanic ash and droplets of sulfuric acid and water obscuring the Sun and raising Earth's albedo (increasing the reflection of solar radiation) after a large, particularly explosive volcanic eruption. Long-term cooling effects are primarily dependent upon injection of sulfur gases into the stratosphere where they undergo a series of reactions to create sulfuric acid which can nucleate and form aerosols. Volcanic stratospheric aerosols cool the surface by reflecting solar radiation and warm the stratosphere by absorbing terrestrial radiation. The variations in atmospheric warming and cooling result in changes in tropospheric and stratospheric circulation.

WikimediaUI Dark mode is a gadget for enabling dark mode in modern browsers, based on experimental work of Wikimedia Design team members Volker E. and Alex Hollender in support by volunteer MusikAnimal and others.

Preview dark mode on the Main Page.

To enable, go to your gadget preferences, and enable the gadget "Dark mode toggle: Enable a toggle for using a light text on dark background color scheme".

You should now see a "Dark mode" switch at the top of pages. If you wish to enable/disable dark mode automatically based on your system colour scheme, add the following to your common.js page:

Any modern browser works with the only exception being Opera Mini, which lacks filter support.

The CSS was written with Wikipedia sites in mind (see phab:T221425) so experience on other wikis may not be optimal.

To set up the gadget on your wiki, ask an interface-admin to do the following:

• Create the pages MediaWiki:Gadget-dark-mode.css, MediaWiki:Gadget-dark-mode-toggle-pagestyles.css and MediaWiki:Gadget-dark-mode-toggle.js by copying the English Wikipedia versions. Adjust the localisation strings as appropriate.
  • While the CSS pages need to be copied to avoid FOUCs arising from slow load, for the JS page you may instead dynamically load the enwiki version:
  • Replace "Dark mode" and "Light mode" after content: in the CSS files with the localised labels.
• Add to MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition:
• Add the following to the bottom of MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition. This is an internal gadget which can't be marked as hidden, for technical reasons.
• Create the gadget description pages MediaWiki:Gadget-dark-mode-toggle (the main "dark mode" gadget) and MediaWiki:Gadget-dark-mode (this is the internal gadget – make sure the description is such that users don't enable this one).

The gadget has several limitations due to the way it achieves the dark mode. Known issues are:

• It can be slow, especially on larger pages.
• Images are colorshifted
• Native Emojis are inverted
• Text only SVGs with transparent backgrounds can be unreadable (as they are treated as images, and thus do not get dark mode)
• The color legends in captions, might not match the colors of images for maps and/or graphs.

Most problems are due to how the gadget was implemented. It first inverts and colorshifts the entire page, and then tries to 'undo' the areas you do not want inverted, such as images. The benefit to this approach is that it takes care of dark mode everywhere, without having hundreds and hundreds of lines of codes for all the nooks and crannies of Wikipedia/MediaWiki that have their own styling. The downside are the problems listed.

For an example of what to expect on invert "dark mode" and double-invert "undo", see the question pictures in this StackOverflow question. The question uses the same invert and hue-rotate filter used by this extension.

🔗 Biography 🔗 France 🔗 Architecture 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment 🔗 Craft

Ferdinand Cheval (19 April 1836 – 19 August 1924) was a French postman who spent thirty-three years of his life building Le Palais idéal (the "Ideal Palace") in Hauterives. The Palace is regarded as an extraordinary example of naïve art architecture.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Marketing & Advertising

Domain tasting is the practice of temporarily registering a domain under the five-day Add Grace Period at the beginning of the registration of an ICANN-regulated second-level domain. During this period, a registration must be fully refunded by the domain name registry if cancelled. This was designed to address accidental registrations, but domain tasters use the Add Grace Period for illegal purposes.

🔗 Lists 🔗 Anthroponymy

This list of eponymous laws provides links to articles on laws, principles, adages, and other succinct observations or predictions named after a person. In some cases the person named has coined the law – such as Parkinson's law. In others, the work or publications of the individual have led to the law being so named – as is the case with Moore's law. There are also laws ascribed to individuals by others, such as Murphy's law; or given eponymous names despite the absence of the named person.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 Science Fiction

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by American writer Walter M. Miller Jr., first published in 1959. Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz preserve the surviving remnants of man's scientific knowledge until the world is again ready for it.

The novel is a fixup of three short stories Miller published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction that were inspired by the author's participation in the bombing of the monastery at the Battle of Monte Cassino during World War II. The book is considered one of the classics of science fiction and has never been out of print. Appealing to mainstream and genre critics and readers alike, it won the 1961 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel, and its themes of religion, recurrence, and church versus state have generated a significant body of scholarly research. A sequel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, was published posthumously in 1997.