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Columbia Coverage
ke4roh writes "Space.com offers a list of questions and answers about the events and hardware surrounding Columbia's destruction Saturday. They address suspected causes, foam, tile, and some of the alternatives had NASA known the ship would not be able to re-enter the atmosphere." viewstyle writes "PC Magazine has a pack of stuff put together on the space shuttle accident, as they recognized the fact that the space program inspired a lot of tech people in general. What's pretty cool is the section written by a guy there who worked on the computer components in the shuttle." And naturally, the idea of a space elevator is back in vogue again.
damn, just missed it
It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
5 -- You tested at a 3rd grade level on the math section of the SATs
4 -- You'd rather be golfing than reporting on the biggest NASA disaster since the Challenger
3 -- You honestly believe that the moon is twenty-five pentillion billion miles away from Earth, and that a rickety old spaceship normally travels about 3 to 4 times the speed of light
2 -- It beats working for a living
... and the number 1 reason to become a television news anchor
1 -- It's the only job where you won't get fired for wearing makeup
Yet another original Top 5 from *nix.org!
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
It seems someone has found a part of Columbia that arrived at a strange place[news.com]. Awesome.
Well, here's a variation for slashdot -- GayOrNot!
We'll show you a picture of a slashdot luser, you tell us if he is gay, or not!
Today's participant....
Please Welcome Kragen! (bonus points if you guess by name only!)
Gay ... or Not?
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=top News&storyID=2152925
Iraqis Call Shuttle Disaster God's Vengeance
Sat February 1, 2003 03:23 PM ET
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Immediate popular reaction in Baghdad on Saturday to the loss of the U.S. space shuttle Columbia and its seven-member crew -- including the first Israeli in space -- was that it was God's retribution.
"We are happy that it broke up," government employee Abdul Jabbar al-Quraishi said.
"God wants to show that his might is greater than the Americans. They have encroached on our country. God is avenging us," he said.
Iraqis are braced for a possible U.S.-led war to rid their country of any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons it may possess. Iraq denies it has such weapons.
Car mechanic Mohammed Jaber al-Tamini noted Israeli air force Colonel Ilan Ramon was among the dead when the shuttle broke up over the southwestern United States 16 minutes before its scheduled landing.
The 48-year-old Israeli astronaut was a fighter pilot in the Israeli air force. He was the youngest pilot in a team that bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981. Israel said the reactor was intended to develop nuclear weapons.
"Israel launched an aggression on us when it raided our nuclear reactor without any reason, now time has come and God has retaliated to their aggression," Tamini said.
There were no such signs of jubilation over the shuttle disaster in any of the Palestinian territories. The official response from the Palestinians was one of condolence.
"President (Yasser) Arafat and the Palestinian Authority offer their condolences to the six American families and the Israeli family who lost their loved ones in the catastrophe," Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian official and spokesman, told Reuters.
Erekat said Arafat had sent President Bush a message of condolences over the loss of the NASA space agency's shuttle. The United States, Israel's closest ally, is the chief Middle East peace broker.
trolling little spoilsport. You're probably the kind who also said "man? in space? bah, scifi technical sounding bullshit"
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
It appears people here cannot 'think' for themselves, only follow.
I post many posts, and many are moderated up to +5
Soon after the gatecrashers party in and abuse my posts. They post derogatory.
Then soon again after my posts are moderated down.
Perhaps the first solution is the better and I have scared those of you who choose not to 'think' but to 'follow'
This
" for example, as one part of a transport system, you could hypothesize that a seamless body built out of (say) 1000-times as strong self-sealing materials comprising millions of layers of ablative and structural thin film, with a passive self-righting shape, might not have any problem at all in dealing with reentry conditions."
is SOYUZ MODULE!