Dead Star Set to Escape the Milky Way

slackah wrote to mention a NewScientist.com article discussing a fast-moving stellar corpse on its way out of our galaxy. From the article: "The object, called B1508+55, is a rotating neutron star, or pulsar. It is the superdense core of a massive star that exploded as a supernova about 2.5 million years ago. The explosion seems to have ejected the pulsar with such force that it will eventually escape the Milky Way entirely, says team member Shami Chatterjee, an astronomer with NRAO and CfA."

Comments

Open Source, Linux and the JPL

[Anonymous Coward]

I started (or attempted to start) using Linux a few years back when I started university, just out of plain curiosity. My buddy and I downloaded the ISO images of Red Hat Linux 8.0, and from that point forward, it all went to shit.

I figured it would be no problem, I used Sun's Solaris quite a bit so I understood the shell at least. Install went well, even though I was confused why I needed seven million partitions which I had to allocate manually and to have a root password since it was a single user machine. After my install, I restarted my machine, saw a bunch of ugly crap being spewed to the screen, and before you knew it, X Windows loaded up and I was in Linux. "Ooh, this looks neat, just like Windows. Let's see if I can surf the web!"

This is the point where I discovered the 'magic' of Linux. It couldn't find a driver for a simple ethernet card. So I got onto another computer running Windows, and found some type of driver for it. All right, I'll just burn it to a cd, pop it onto the Linux machine, and we're good to go. I started looking around for the CD ROM icon...where was it? Apparently I had to mount it manually, luckily I know UNIX. Then it asks me for root password. Okay, so I enter it. Then I can see the CD ROM, great. Oh look, the driver is in the form of source code, I have to compile it. So I tried to compile it with the configure script that came along. Oh wait, I need some !@#$ing stupid C library. All right, so I download that as well in the form of a RPM, which luckily worked, and then I was able to compile the driver.

Okay now what? According to the instructions, I had to recompile the kernel making the driver a part of it. 'Recompile the kernel?' I thought, 'What kind of sick operating system makes you recompile its kernel...' Apparently I didn't know what kind of twisted people designed Linux. Oh wait, it wants the stupid root password again...good God. So after about 5 hours, I had Internet...given that I knew how to use a UNIX machine. Four days later I tried installing something else, it asked me for the same stupid C library but version 1.2.3.4.5 instead of the version I had...God forbid...1.2.3.4.4 (oh what a fool I was for not updating every 10 minutes!) Within an hour, my drive was formatted (twice out of spite) and running Windows XP.

A few months back I was inspired again to run Linux. If you read the tech news, there's no doubt about it, it's taking over the server market. A Linux sys admin will make 20 grand more than a Windows sys admin (Makes you wonder if 20 grand is worth eventual suicide), so I felt I should pick it up. Of course now I was more prepared, I've read books, admin guides, worked as a student UNIX operator, 3 years under my belt as a computer science student, two internships, and had studied the Linux kernel in depth.

I decided I would try a whole bunch of distributions, I tried Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 2, SuSe 9.1, Debian, and Mandrake 10. All special in there own little way...like retarded children. As soon as SuSe loaded up, I was like..."nice nice, very sleek...", then a hissing came out my left speaker that wouldn't go away. Nice autodetection for the sound driver. Bye bye SuSe. All right, let's try Red Hat 9...oh look Red Hat won't give any more automatic updates because now that it has a little bit of money...!@#$ open source, let's become the next Microsoft! Oh Debian and Mandrake, just plain ugly and slow.

What about Fedora Core, Red Hat's latest method of getting code for free rather than having to pay programmers in India $0.85 an hour to do it. Why pay someone when you can have some idiot from GNU or some grad student do it for free, then sell it for 400 bucks a pop. It was surprising though that that experimental piece of crap worked better than all the other distributions, even though its autoupdate some how corrupted my kernel and I had to overwrite it.

But what I find most stupid is the philosophy behind it. Why make something so complex for free? I'm an excellent software engineer, good software is hard to m

WHY DON'T YOU LISTEN TO ME

[Anonymous Coward]

George Bush doesn't care about black people
George Bush doesn't care about black people
George Bush doesn't care about black people

Re:WHY DON'T YOU LISTEN TO ME

[Anonymous Coward]

He doesn't care about whites either! He doesn't care about whites either! He doesn't care about whites either! He doesn't care about whites either! He doesn't care about whites either! He doesn't care about whites either! He doesn't care about whites either! He doesn't care about whites either!

Slashdotted: Mirror here

[Anonymous Coward]

http://tinyurl.com/dpunv

Re:Galaxies must be a lot more dynamic than I thou

[vought]

I'm sorry; I'm completely disgusted by the "so what" attitude here on Slashdot with regard to the Hurricane.

I know this is "news for nerds" and a technology site. Slashdot covered 9/11 like a blanket, but all week long, there's been a single appeal on the front page for donations.

As a former resident of New Orleans and someone who fell in love with computers in part because of the dedicated computer staff at Loyola and Tulane (Loyola's Gandalf, I remember thee well) I find it hard to comprehend the lack of a floating banner on this site dedicated to disaster relief. I'm also blown away by the "mine mine mine" attitude of geeks in the prevous hurricane thread.

I don't give a shit what you mod me, because I care about what I'm writing, and more importantly, I know about what I'm writing.

Slashdot is irrelevant while this goes on. The people who were left behind in New Orleans are the ones who should have access to the same kind of math and science educations we all got.

Slashdot "People In Charge" (yes, I'm equating you with the "PICs" at Fry's electronics, which should give you all an idea of what I think of your response to this disaster), I am formally asking you to put a permanent banner for disaster relief linked to the red cross on your homepage.

Shame on you if you don't.

Re:Galaxies must be a lot more dynamic than I thou

[PakProtector]

I haven't eaten bait in a while. Here I go.

I live in Florida. We get hurricanes all the time. Now, I realise that New Orleans is pretty much wiped off the face of the Earth, and all your prisoners were let loose, and now you have to pay for it since the first thing they all did was break into pawn shops and get guns. But really. Just like the Law of Gravitation, I don't need to be constantly reminded of it.

I didn't need so much reminding of 9/11, either.

I also happen to live in Gainesville, Florida, where Danny Rollins killed 5 people 15 years ago.

There is a section of wall in town, called 'The Wall,' where one is allowed to commit the crime of graffiti and no one really cares. There is a section of wall there that reads 'We will always remember,' or maybe it's 'We will never forget,' but you get the idea.

I don't need to be reminded of depressing, horrible events every day. There's something called letting go of the past, so that you can move forward.

I don't suggest to forget it -- I'll never forget that, say, the Holocaust occured -- but I don't let it run my life.

Now, I realise this is somewhat silly with the Hurricane having destroyed your city from the face of Terra so recently, but you get the idea, right?

Also, as you point out, /. is a technology website. Or, it claims to be. How exactly does Katrina impact the world of Computers and Technology?

egg

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if this dragon's egg, er, goose egg has any cheela?