Every popular Operating System developed in the past 15 years (and then some) apart from Linux has been either a microkernel or a hybrid kernel.
Mach, upon which Darwin and OS X are based is a microkernel. OSX and Darwin borrow some monolithic-esque features, but not quite enough to make them hybrids it would seem...
Windows NT, NetWare, ReactOS and BeOS are all Hybrid kernels. This model seems to be the most popular right now, and seems to be a reasonable compromise...
The only thing that's left are the old big-iron Unices, Solaris, MS-DOS, and Linux. In other words, Linux is the only major player left using a monolithic kernel. I don't know enough about computer science to properly make an argument one way or another, but it would see that monolithic kernels have heavily fallen out of favor in the past 15 years.
That said, perhaps a monolithic kernel is better suited to the open-source development process, which would seem counterintuitive at first because it discourages modularization, but who knows.... it could very well be true. I don't know enough to comment.
man, it sounds like those thin-clients really SUCKED.
literally..... I mean, I've never actually heard of computers, let alone thin-clients that had intake fans powerful enough to pick up nearby objects off of the desk and suck them into the machine, nor have I ever heard of a computer sucking up a nearby liquid and commiting suicide by doing so.
You've got to love it that when a computer is so efficent that it's only limited by the speed at which data can be fed into it.
When testing to see how fast the Colossus could perform reliably, engineers found that it would perform flawlessly until it was running so fast that the paper tapes that fed the input data into Colossus caught fire, at which point they abandoned the experiment for fear that they'd burn the wood-framed building down. A true testament to Turing and the other fine scientists at Bletchly Park.
Pity Churchill ordered it destroyed after the war was over. It was decades ahead of its time.
College students are currently sustaining the market for used N64s. I find it pretty amusing to tell the truth, but not surprising at all.
Great "social" games like Super Smash Boros that can be played amongst 4 people with a small learning curve for short periods of time. The GameCube improved on this, and is consequently seen as the #2 gaming system amongst my friends.
There are a handful of PS2s and XBoxes, but the people who play them keep mainly to themselves.
Thank you Nintendo for keeping us entertained, supporting our social lives, and leaving some money left over for pizza.
Also has the remarkable effect of being a stimulant, but not a sleep-deprivant. In other words, if you need to stay up to get some work done, you can, but if you decide 15 minutes in to screw it, you can go to bed and fall asleep without a problem.
Problem is that it can be hard to find, and you may need to resort to buying suspicious-looking bricks of the stuff, and filling your own tea-bags.
PC-BSD is built on top of FreeBSD and aims to dumb down installation and daily usage, enabling a non-technical user to run it as his primary desktop
Good. Now change the name so that a non-technical user will know what the heck it is.
Nothing more daunting than a string of acronyms that the average uesr doesn't know, nor need to know. Heck.... the BSD acronym is maily irrelevant nowindays anyway....
You've obviously never used anything powered by a set of vacuum tubes. A Tube-Powered TV used to take several minutes to "warm up".
Likewise, I'll agree that modern digital cameras do suck in terms of delays, but this is actually a necessity of the feature that allows you to see the live preview. Get rid of the live preview, and you get near-instantaneous shutter-releases. The same obviously applies to all DSLRs as well -- a modern DSLR can easily surpass old old film SLRs in terms of frames per second, simply because there's no film to advance.
I'm curious if the commenting/version-tracking stuff is in there. This is one area where Word really shines, and has noticably improved in the past few versions.
Granted, I rarely use OpenOffice, but am curious to see how it stacks up. I actually do enjoy the fact that many of the more "advanced" features in word work extremely well when I need them. The features for managing large documents are appreciated as well with support for tables-of-contents and excellent footnote support.
I'm no big Microsoft fan (heck, I jumped ship on windows in favor of MacOS back in the OS 8 days), but I've got to say that Office has struck me as an application that was done right. Once I started writing, editing, and organizing extremely long papers, I was pleasantly surprised to find the features I was looking for actually present in the application, and even more surprised when they worked exactly in the way I expected them to.
Granted, the programs can suck when used for purposes other than the ones they were intended for -- desktop publishing in MS Word sucks, but it's an excellent word processor, just like Apple's Pages is amazing for publishing, but terrible for word processing. Ditto for using word to write scientific papers (although since pretty much the entire scientific community uses LaTeX, this really isn't an issue).
So I'd say that there actually may be a fair number of legitimate features that didn't get included, and microsoft's cause for concern is valid. Would someone else like to comment?
Think Independent. And Vote Independent. The parties won't fix jack shit. They have all their fingers smeared by the same pie and are beholden to the same interests.
I like the sentiment, but quite honestly, voting independent is like voting for the party you oppose the most (in this case, most likely the Rebpublicans)
If you really want to make a change, vote for a moderate. Moderates have the best track record for actually getting stuff done, and aren't afraid to vote against their party's beliefs. John McCain will be running in 2008, and if elected, would do a lot to fix the mess that is the Republican Party. Even though I veer twoard the side of liberal, unless the democrats manage to field an excellent candidate (NOT Hillary or Kerry!), I intend to vote McCain in 2008. The other republican forerunner, Giuliani is also quite moderate. Can't say the same for Condi though.....
By your logic, because Apple now has a much higer visibility, it is a more likely target for viruses.
This is true, and I'm not going to argue with it. However, your reasoning behind it is faulty. Just because it is now being targeted more, does not mean that we are going to see huge numbers of viruses cropping up for OS X.
Heck, the "virus" described in the article isn't a virus at all. It's a trojan, and a shitty one at that. The guy downloaded an executable from an unknown source, and willingly ran it. "strange commands ran as if the machine was under the control of someone -- or something -- else."
Not only did the guy make a boneheaded move that would effect even the most secure operating system in the world, it was obviously apparent that the file being run was a virus the second he opened it. I don't think this is any cause for concern.
What's more, in order to inflict any serious damage on an OS X machine, you've got to provide the Administrator password. It is impossible to run OS X as root. If a program's trying to screw with your settings and files, you're going to know about it! Likewise, unlike Windows, file permissions are properly implemented (it's Unix after all...).
By your logic, because approximately 70% of the internet's web servers run Apache, we should be seeing tons of apache exploits, hacks, and viruses cropping up. The reason we don't is because Apache is a well-written and secure program, and because administrators are generally not stupid enough to run unmarked executables.
OS X and unix are inherently more secure by design than Windows is. This is a known fact that has been proven by time. I'll go a step further and say that because OS X is only 5 years old, and NT has had 10+ years to mature, that Windows should be more secure than OS X is. We all know this isn't the case. 95% of Windows viruses, trojans, and spyware would not be possible on OS X or unix simply due to the design of the OS.
Likewise, the article points out seven new vulnerabilities that were discovered two months ago that have yet to be patched, and draws the conclusion that "They didn't know how to deal with security", but later admits that the vulnerabilities wouldn't actually allow someone to execute malicious code on your machine, and that they're being rolled up into the next OS X security update. (Coincidentally, I've got to praise apple for their cumulative and bundled security updates. It makes it TONS easier for end users and administrators to install the updates, avoids confusion, and makes it significantly more likely for these people to install the updates to begin with, compared to the many crypticly-titled windows security fixes and the ActiveX horror that is Windows Update)
In short, the entire article is a piece of crap. Sure, OS X isn't perfectly safe, and it's a given that any system is vulnurable to a stupid user. However, it's damn better than anything else out there. Shame on slashdot for posting such a poorly-researched piece like this.
PS. Do not blame MSNBC for the content of the article. The article came through via the Associated Press, and appears on Cnn.com in addition to a plethora of other sites.
For the love of God, save this guy's poor server, and use a torrent instead. Remember to seed after you're done downloading. there's a pretty big demand for this clip.
Be forewarned however... the torrent contains the entire C-Span broadcast of the event. Colbert's speech starts around the 54 minute mark. Some of the other bits are pretty funny, including bush playing along with an impersonator, although absolutely nothing can beat Colbert's speech. Watch it. It's funny on so many levels. I've never seen such a huge disconnect between a comedian and his audience -- it took some major guts to do what he did.
I think this one's going to go down in the history books, and is by far the funniest thing ever broadcated on C-Span's airspace.
Given that it was a government project, this is almost definitely NOT true.
If you come in 15 million under budget, the budgeting committees are going to look at it, and say "Good job. Now we can give you less money next year".
In government spending, the goal is often to spend as much of your budget as possible, only going slightly over the original budgeted amount. This way, you get a slightly incresed budget the next year, and don't necessarily get blamed for over-spending. The only reward for coming in under-budget is a reduced budget the next time around.
In other words, Linux is cheap even if you TRY to make it costly.
And to point out a huge omission in the article: The linux installation is replacing a Commercial Unix installation. It's been acknowledged along ago that non-platform-specific commercial unices are dead, and the platform-specific ones are dying (OS X being the only exception).
If they were replacing windows, this would be a big story. Unix replacing another unix is hardly newsworthy. Such a migration should be trivial (the fact that it's not completely trivial is one of my major gripes with modern unix. IMO, any 2 unix systems should be almost completely interchangable, requiring nothing more than a simple recompile)
Apple doesn't exactly have a rich history of working nicely with other toolkits. QT in my experience doesn't have a history of working nicely with anything.
that said, I'll probably check it out. I've been using (and loving) RawShooter on Windows for quite awhile now, and am looking for something just as good for the mac. (Lightroom's nice, but is painfully slow on my 12" powerbook and doesn't play nicely with the 1024x768 screen)
I'll second that opinion. The FirePod is considered to be by and far the best solution for getting 8 tracks of audio into a computer at this point.
Your mess of multiple interfaces is going to hurt you in the long run with latency issues and whatnot. Just don't do it. Seriously.
What's more, the Firepod isn't that expensive considering what you're getting. $600 is perfectly reasonable for a high-quality piece of audio gear (PRO audio gear that is, the stuff designed for musicians and the like. None of that prosumer crap. )
You know.... ironically, if it weren't for the boneheaded actions of the recording industry, we probably would have never discovered great indie bands like The Arcade Fire.
Microsoft did Unix back in the 80s, and used it internally well into the 90s.
I would trust Microsoft's Unix knowledge just as well as I'd trust Apple's unix knowledge in the late 90s --- and look at the runaway success that OS X has been.
Don't judge a book by its cover. I'm not the biggest fan of Microsoft, but I'll concede that they've had a number of fantastic successes to their name. Powershell sounds quite interesting and innovative from what I hear -- actually one of the few true 'innovations' to come out of MS in recent memory. I'll look forward to seeing how it works out.
I'm going to bet that you've got one of the first-generation 12" Powerbooks. They were notorious for heat problems (I used one once. couldn't put the damn thing on your lap it was so hot). Soon after receiving tons of feedback from angry customers, Apple indroduced a second revision that largely corrected the heat problems.
In later models, the heat output was even reduced. I've got the latest version of the 12" Powerbook, and I've got to say that it's one of the "coolest" machines i've ever used, especially when CPU throttling is enabled (which it should be if you're running on batteries). Battery life is a little over 2 hours which you can stretch far beyond 3 by not playing music, turning off airport, turning down brightness, etc. Easily the best machine I've ever owned, and definitely the finest powerbook ever produced (It's the smallest apple on the market, and yet it's mostly feature-complete except for Firewire-800 and a big graphics chip, both of which don't really fit in on an ultraportable anyway. Apple made huge strides with the 12" powerbook, taking it from a stripped-down underperforming ultraportable to a full-featured machine. and I'm praying that the rumors of its demise are false. Although I'd love a higher-resolution screen, a 13.3" size will completely ruin it)
The sun's emitting a hulluva lot more radiation on its own than anything we can send at it, especially something on the order of magnitude of millions of tons. Unless we lob an earth-sized chunk of plutonium at it, I don't think we've got anything to worry about. Stuff must crash into it all the time, right?
Oh. And it's not like we haven't lost nuclear waste/material by burning up in the atmosphere before. The soviets (and russians IIRC) have inadvertently blown up a number of nuclear-powered spacecraft before leaving the atmosphere. Likewise, nuclear powered satelittes have de-orbited and crashed to earth (some of which have survived the descent, contaminating small areas with radiation.
That's how they produce heavily resistant strands of bacteria (to just about everything -- not just radiation)
Grow a colony in a petri dish. Nuke it until only 10% remain. Let it repopulate back to the original population, repeat ad infinitium.
The bacteria you get at the end are frighteningly hard to kill.
(That said, there is very limited data on the health effects of living in an environment with higher-than-normal (but not lethal) background radiation. Many of the people who survived chernobyl with no exposure to the initial blast(for whatever reason -- were underground at the time, behind a lead wall, etc.) have had no long-term health problems from living in the area.
Modern science says that these people and animals should be dead. Long-term exposure to low levels of radiation apparently are not as bad as we initially thought they were. Ditto for the animals)
Slashdot Mirror
HUH??
Get your facts straight.
Every popular Operating System developed in the past 15 years (and then some) apart from Linux has been either a microkernel or a hybrid kernel.
Mach, upon which Darwin and OS X are based is a microkernel. OSX and Darwin borrow some monolithic-esque features, but not quite enough to make them hybrids it would seem...
Windows NT, NetWare, ReactOS and BeOS are all Hybrid kernels. This model seems to be the most popular right now, and seems to be a reasonable compromise...
The only thing that's left are the old big-iron Unices, Solaris, MS-DOS, and Linux. In other words, Linux is the only major player left using a monolithic kernel. I don't know enough about computer science to properly make an argument one way or another, but it would see that monolithic kernels have heavily fallen out of favor in the past 15 years.
That said, perhaps a monolithic kernel is better suited to the open-source development process, which would seem counterintuitive at first because it discourages modularization, but who knows.... it could very well be true. I don't know enough to comment.
man, it sounds like those thin-clients really SUCKED.
literally..... I mean, I've never actually heard of computers, let alone thin-clients that had intake fans powerful enough to pick up nearby objects off of the desk and suck them into the machine, nor have I ever heard of a computer sucking up a nearby liquid and commiting suicide by doing so.
it's definitely sucking
You've got to love it that when a computer is so efficent that it's only limited by the speed at which data can be fed into it.
When testing to see how fast the Colossus could perform reliably, engineers found that it would perform flawlessly until it was running so fast that the paper tapes that fed the input data into Colossus caught fire, at which point they abandoned the experiment for fear that they'd burn the wood-framed building down. A true testament to Turing and the other fine scientists at Bletchly Park.
Pity Churchill ordered it destroyed after the war was over. It was decades ahead of its time.
College students are currently sustaining the market for used N64s. I find it pretty amusing to tell the truth, but not surprising at all.
Great "social" games like Super Smash Boros that can be played amongst 4 people with a small learning curve for short periods of time. The GameCube improved on this, and is consequently seen as the #2 gaming system amongst my friends.
There are a handful of PS2s and XBoxes, but the people who play them keep mainly to themselves.
Thank you Nintendo for keeping us entertained, supporting our social lives, and leaving some money left over for pizza.
Hah. Tea and Coffee are for whimps.
Mate (pronounced mah-tay) is where it's at!
Also has the remarkable effect of being a stimulant, but not a sleep-deprivant. In other words, if you need to stay up to get some work done, you can, but if you decide 15 minutes in to screw it, you can go to bed and fall asleep without a problem.
Problem is that it can be hard to find, and you may need to resort to buying suspicious-looking bricks of the stuff, and filling your own tea-bags.
Good. Now change the name so that a non-technical user will know what the heck it is.
Nothing more daunting than a string of acronyms that the average uesr doesn't know, nor need to know. Heck.... the BSD acronym is maily irrelevant nowindays anyway....
You've obviously never used anything powered by a set of vacuum tubes. A Tube-Powered TV used to take several minutes to "warm up".
Likewise, I'll agree that modern digital cameras do suck in terms of delays, but this is actually a necessity of the feature that allows you to see the live preview. Get rid of the live preview, and you get near-instantaneous shutter-releases. The same obviously applies to all DSLRs as well -- a modern DSLR can easily surpass old old film SLRs in terms of frames per second, simply because there's no film to advance.
I'm curious if the commenting/version-tracking stuff is in there. This is one area where Word really shines, and has noticably improved in the past few versions.
Granted, I rarely use OpenOffice, but am curious to see how it stacks up. I actually do enjoy the fact that many of the more "advanced" features in word work extremely well when I need them. The features for managing large documents are appreciated as well with support for tables-of-contents and excellent footnote support.
I'm no big Microsoft fan (heck, I jumped ship on windows in favor of MacOS back in the OS 8 days), but I've got to say that Office has struck me as an application that was done right. Once I started writing, editing, and organizing extremely long papers, I was pleasantly surprised to find the features I was looking for actually present in the application, and even more surprised when they worked exactly in the way I expected them to.
Granted, the programs can suck when used for purposes other than the ones they were intended for -- desktop publishing in MS Word sucks, but it's an excellent word processor, just like Apple's Pages is amazing for publishing, but terrible for word processing. Ditto for using word to write scientific papers (although since pretty much the entire scientific community uses LaTeX, this really isn't an issue).
So I'd say that there actually may be a fair number of legitimate features that didn't get included, and microsoft's cause for concern is valid. Would someone else like to comment?
For those of you who don't get the joke
"It's definitely sucking"
I don't know which scares me more... this guy driving a jet-powered VW or that you're advocating driving on the wrong side of the road.
If you can see him coming, you're obviously on the wrong side....
In reponse to this news, Apple stock was up 3% today.
This is a dangerous game Microsoft's playing.
Slashdot.... the only place where it is necessary to use the Coral cache to display a blank GIF so that the host server doesn't go down in flames....
No. it's not exactly razor-thin.
According to DownhillBattle, Apple takes a $0.35 cut from every song. The labels take a whopping $0.53, and the artists get a paltry $0.11.
A 35% profit is pretty good in any book.
Think Independent. And Vote Independent. The parties won't fix jack shit. They have all their fingers smeared by the same pie and are beholden to the same interests.
I like the sentiment, but quite honestly, voting independent is like voting for the party you oppose the most (in this case, most likely the Rebpublicans)
If you really want to make a change, vote for a moderate. Moderates have the best track record for actually getting stuff done, and aren't afraid to vote against their party's beliefs. John McCain will be running in 2008, and if elected, would do a lot to fix the mess that is the Republican Party. Even though I veer twoard the side of liberal, unless the democrats manage to field an excellent candidate (NOT Hillary or Kerry!), I intend to vote McCain in 2008. The other republican forerunner, Giuliani is also quite moderate. Can't say the same for Condi though.....
I call bullshit.
By your logic, because Apple now has a much higer visibility, it is a more likely target for viruses.
This is true, and I'm not going to argue with it. However, your reasoning behind it is faulty. Just because it is now being targeted more, does not mean that we are going to see huge numbers of viruses cropping up for OS X.
Heck, the "virus" described in the article isn't a virus at all. It's a trojan, and a shitty one at that. The guy downloaded an executable from an unknown source, and willingly ran it. "strange commands ran as if the machine was under the control of someone -- or something -- else."
Not only did the guy make a boneheaded move that would effect even the most secure operating system in the world, it was obviously apparent that the file being run was a virus the second he opened it. I don't think this is any cause for concern.
What's more, in order to inflict any serious damage on an OS X machine, you've got to provide the Administrator password. It is impossible to run OS X as root. If a program's trying to screw with your settings and files, you're going to know about it! Likewise, unlike Windows, file permissions are properly implemented (it's Unix after all...).
By your logic, because approximately 70% of the internet's web servers run Apache, we should be seeing tons of apache exploits, hacks, and viruses cropping up. The reason we don't is because Apache is a well-written and secure program, and because administrators are generally not stupid enough to run unmarked executables.
OS X and unix are inherently more secure by design than Windows is. This is a known fact that has been proven by time. I'll go a step further and say that because OS X is only 5 years old, and NT has had 10+ years to mature, that Windows should be more secure than OS X is. We all know this isn't the case. 95% of Windows viruses, trojans, and spyware would not be possible on OS X or unix simply due to the design of the OS.
Likewise, the article points out seven new vulnerabilities that were discovered two months ago that have yet to be patched, and draws the conclusion that "They didn't know how to deal with security", but later admits that the vulnerabilities wouldn't actually allow someone to execute malicious code on your machine, and that they're being rolled up into the next OS X security update. (Coincidentally, I've got to praise apple for their cumulative and bundled security updates. It makes it TONS easier for end users and administrators to install the updates, avoids confusion, and makes it significantly more likely for these people to install the updates to begin with, compared to the many crypticly-titled windows security fixes and the ActiveX horror that is Windows Update)
In short, the entire article is a piece of crap. Sure, OS X isn't perfectly safe, and it's a given that any system is vulnurable to a stupid user. However, it's damn better than anything else out there. Shame on slashdot for posting such a poorly-researched piece like this.
PS. Do not blame MSNBC for the content of the article. The article came through via the Associated Press, and appears on Cnn.com in addition to a plethora of other sites.
For the love of God, save this guy's poor server, and use a torrent instead. Remember to seed after you're done downloading. there's a pretty big demand for this clip.
Be forewarned however... the torrent contains the entire C-Span broadcast of the event. Colbert's speech starts around the 54 minute mark. Some of the other bits are pretty funny, including bush playing along with an impersonator, although absolutely nothing can beat Colbert's speech. Watch it. It's funny on so many levels. I've never seen such a huge disconnect between a comedian and his audience -- it took some major guts to do what he did.
I think this one's going to go down in the history books, and is by far the funniest thing ever broadcated on C-Span's airspace.
But that's what being a sox fan's all about..... horrible......traumatic experiences.
Heck, after we won the World Series for the first time in 86 years, not knowing what else to do we rioted anyway.
Given that it was a government project, this is almost definitely NOT true.
If you come in 15 million under budget, the budgeting committees are going to look at it, and say "Good job. Now we can give you less money next year".
In government spending, the goal is often to spend as much of your budget as possible, only going slightly over the original budgeted amount. This way, you get a slightly incresed budget the next year, and don't necessarily get blamed for over-spending. The only reward for coming in under-budget is a reduced budget the next time around.
In other words, Linux is cheap even if you TRY to make it costly.
And to point out a huge omission in the article: The linux installation is replacing a Commercial Unix installation. It's been acknowledged along ago that non-platform-specific commercial unices are dead, and the platform-specific ones are dying (OS X being the only exception).
If they were replacing windows, this would be a big story. Unix replacing another unix is hardly newsworthy. Such a migration should be trivial (the fact that it's not completely trivial is one of my major gripes with modern unix. IMO, any 2 unix systems should be almost completely interchangable, requiring nothing more than a simple recompile)
QT Based......on a mac.......
dear god.
Apple doesn't exactly have a rich history of working nicely with other toolkits. QT in my experience doesn't have a history of working nicely with anything.
that said, I'll probably check it out. I've been using (and loving) RawShooter on Windows for quite awhile now, and am looking for something just as good for the mac. (Lightroom's nice, but is painfully slow on my 12" powerbook and doesn't play nicely with the 1024x768 screen)
I'll second that opinion. The FirePod is considered to be by and far the best solution for getting 8 tracks of audio into a computer at this point.
Your mess of multiple interfaces is going to hurt you in the long run with latency issues and whatnot. Just don't do it. Seriously.
What's more, the Firepod isn't that expensive considering what you're getting. $600 is perfectly reasonable for a high-quality piece of audio gear (PRO audio gear that is, the stuff designed for musicians and the like. None of that prosumer crap. )
You know.... ironically, if it weren't for the boneheaded actions of the recording industry, we probably would have never discovered great indie bands like The Arcade Fire.
(and yes. they do put on a great live show)
How quickly we forget history.
Microsoft did Unix back in the 80s, and used it internally well into the 90s.
I would trust Microsoft's Unix knowledge just as well as I'd trust Apple's unix knowledge in the late 90s --- and look at the runaway success that OS X has been.
Don't judge a book by its cover. I'm not the biggest fan of Microsoft, but I'll concede that they've had a number of fantastic successes to their name. Powershell sounds quite interesting and innovative from what I hear -- actually one of the few true 'innovations' to come out of MS in recent memory. I'll look forward to seeing how it works out.
I'm going to bet that you've got one of the first-generation 12" Powerbooks. They were notorious for heat problems (I used one once. couldn't put the damn thing on your lap it was so hot). Soon after receiving tons of feedback from angry customers, Apple indroduced a second revision that largely corrected the heat problems.
In later models, the heat output was even reduced. I've got the latest version of the 12" Powerbook, and I've got to say that it's one of the "coolest" machines i've ever used, especially when CPU throttling is enabled (which it should be if you're running on batteries). Battery life is a little over 2 hours which you can stretch far beyond 3 by not playing music, turning off airport, turning down brightness, etc. Easily the best machine I've ever owned, and definitely the finest powerbook ever produced (It's the smallest apple on the market, and yet it's mostly feature-complete except for Firewire-800 and a big graphics chip, both of which don't really fit in on an ultraportable anyway. Apple made huge strides with the 12" powerbook, taking it from a stripped-down underperforming ultraportable to a full-featured machine. and I'm praying that the rumors of its demise are false. Although I'd love a higher-resolution screen, a 13.3" size will completely ruin it)
Erm.
The sun's emitting a hulluva lot more radiation on its own than anything we can send at it, especially something on the order of magnitude of millions of tons. Unless we lob an earth-sized chunk of plutonium at it, I don't think we've got anything to worry about. Stuff must crash into it all the time, right?
Oh. And it's not like we haven't lost nuclear waste/material by burning up in the atmosphere before. The soviets (and russians IIRC) have inadvertently blown up a number of nuclear-powered spacecraft before leaving the atmosphere. Likewise, nuclear powered satelittes have de-orbited and crashed to earth (some of which have survived the descent, contaminating small areas with radiation.
That's how they produce heavily resistant strands of bacteria (to just about everything -- not just radiation)
Grow a colony in a petri dish. Nuke it until only 10% remain. Let it repopulate back to the original population, repeat ad infinitium.
The bacteria you get at the end are frighteningly hard to kill.
(That said, there is very limited data on the health effects of living in an environment with higher-than-normal (but not lethal) background radiation. Many of the people who survived chernobyl with no exposure to the initial blast(for whatever reason -- were underground at the time, behind a lead wall, etc.) have had no long-term health problems from living in the area.
Modern science says that these people and animals should be dead. Long-term exposure to low levels of radiation apparently are not as bad as we initially thought they were. Ditto for the animals)