I remember an old theory that the moon keeps Earth from boiling over by sweeping away much of the atmosphere over time. I wonder if this is still considered a significant factor?
Its worth noting that the moons of Mars are in much lower orbits than our moon, and mars has much less of an atmosphere than earth.
gave up on the farther safe slopes in favor of the slope immediately at hand.
Yes but they found a (small) red spot. Its not like spirit has to set up camp or anything. As long as the solar panels face north it should be ok.
TFA mentions being close to an outcrop. I haven't seen pictures yet. I wonder what the chance is of a thick sheet of dust being blown on to the rover by a winter storm.
But it would be 5 times as expensive, and 10 times more likely to fail. NASA can't afford either of those at this time. You also get to point way more instrumentation at the result, and almost the entire technology is already tested with the 'deep impact' probe.
Interesting that this project is less ambitious than the original Ranger programme from the early 1960's.
They used to crash the upper stages of the Saturn 5 to gain scientific data from the Moon. Learned a lot that way.
Its a shame they switched off the original ALSEP seismometers, they might actually be able to tell us something about the structure under the south pole.
I wonder how long those RTG's were going to last anyway?
I'm sure there probably is room for them but the thing that I always struggle with is the cost associated with running distro's such as Redhat or something from Novell... If you look at what you can expect to pay Redhat per year to keep your server up to date with updates it definately starts to get expensive...
Where I work it is easier to persuade the PHB's to accept an OSS product if paid maintenance contracts are available. Otherwise they count their reliance on inhouse expertise as a risk.
The Soviets sent probes to Venus a while back and retured pictures.
Those pictures leave me wanting to reach out and raise the camera:)
The surface appears unnaturally flat in all the images, with rocks flush with the surface. It looks strange because we are used to images from mars and the moon which have low gravity and less atmosphere.
But setting that aside these pictures actually look more like earth than pictures from other planets. The heavy weathering seems characteristic of Earth.
Why was "our" Moon not labeled: "Large Dustry Rock Orbiting Earth"?
Well thats exactly what it is, however the moons history orbiting earth has left it with a different composition from asteroids. The moon has hardly any water, while many asteroids are now known to have a lot of water.
So the distinction is still important. The real gray area is with the small outer moons of Jupiter which are called moons but are certainly captured asteroids.
Wonder how long it will take for the moon to completely dissolve into the ring.
The density of the ring doesn't have to be much for it to be visible, and its mass at any one time will be a fraction of the mass of even a very small moon. I don't have the numbers but I suspect the life of that moon will be measured in billions of years, quite possibly longer than the life of the sun.
What they need to do is add a GPS tracking device that is soldered into the motherboard.
GPS hardly ever works. You have to be aware of where the antenna is to get any signal at all. And criminals will still disable the software after stealing the laptop.
Until I implement our own in-house security system (Network based, if a local server is unable to ping a particular desktop/laptop it'll sound an audible alarm) I'll be installing this software on our Macbooks.
But customers will always want to jiggle them, and you don't want to frighten them away.
Stores like harvey norman seem to have a system with a wire attached to a little box stuck to the back of phones, palm tops, etc. There is a LED on the little box to show you that something will happen if the wire is cut.
A simple circuit which is broken when the cable is cut could have sounded the alarm. Perhaps a simple loop of wire which terminates in the display console, and loops through the cable fitting on the laptop. Use the current to hold a relay open. When the relay closes a sonalert goes off. Jaycar have lots of really loud buzzers.
when AJAX and "Web 2.0" crashes and burns, you heard it here, well, not first because I'm not the only one to say it, but, well, you heard it, okay?
Its funny because this was the idea with java all along and it crashed and burned 10 years ago. Of course Java was killed by Microsoft introducing a non-standard implementation on IE. Maybe the will do it again with javascript. OTH maybe Firefox will undercut microsoft and introduce a standard client. Perhaps it is time for people to consider (mostly) firefox specific java apps.
Linux doesn't have the problems that Windows has, because it's more secure by design - not by luck.
The state government here delayed the end of daylight savings by a week. The unix/linux admin at my work used ssh to fiddle with TZ settings on our linux boxes. The windows admin came up with some other scheme...
So there I am typing away in word and a DOS box pops up for about a second, runs a command and closes. Apparently the remote administration tool they use can't run without opening a window on the machine being administered.
Windows was designed from the gound up as a single user workstation. Unix was designed as a multi user server. In general it is easier to turn a server into a client than a client into a server.
Basically, what's Lucent thinking, and why doesn't MAD work here?
Because, like SCO, they are going down. In six months time the name won't exist. Alcatel will do more business in the states, but because of the way big business and Government in the USA operate, this will never work in the long run.
Lucent's main assets are their patents and other IP. Alcatel will proceed to exploit this.
SCO, as I understand it, isn't really SCO. Its caldera using the SCO name. If they had kept their name it would be a better match for what is happening with Lucent.
Slashdot Mirror
From TFA:
Moons venus: 0 earth: 1I remember an old theory that the moon keeps Earth from boiling over by sweeping away much of the atmosphere over time. I wonder if this is still considered a significant factor?
Its worth noting that the moons of Mars are in much lower orbits than our moon, and mars has much less of an atmosphere than earth.
Yes but they found a (small) red spot. Its not like spirit has to set up camp or anything. As long as the solar panels face north it should be ok.
TFA mentions being close to an outcrop. I haven't seen pictures yet. I wonder what the chance is of a thick sheet of dust being blown on to the rover by a winter storm.
Interesting that this project is less ambitious than the original Ranger programme from the early 1960's.
Its a shame they switched off the original ALSEP seismometers, they might actually be able to tell us something about the structure under the south pole.
I wonder how long those RTG's were going to last anyway?
Where I work it is easier to persuade the PHB's to accept an OSS product if paid maintenance contracts are available. Otherwise they count their reliance on inhouse expertise as a risk.
The three main BSD projects are comparable to Debian, yet they manage to get their releases out on a (fairly) regular basis.
Word, ppt, excel, smb, quicken, asf, wmv
Imagine if you had to go to the maker of your car for servicing no matter how old it gets, and independent mechanics could not exist.
Bruce Sterling calls it the Military-Entertainment complex.
Thats a good one
It wasn't clear whether the bill was a mistake, or if Yahaya's father's phone line was used illegally after his death.How? by calling the magellanic clouds?
My wife is Malaysian, and I know how hard it can be to deal with the bureaucracy there.
Those pictures leave me wanting to reach out and raise the camera :)
The surface appears unnaturally flat in all the images, with rocks flush with the surface. It looks strange because we are used to images from mars and the moon which have low gravity and less atmosphere.
But setting that aside these pictures actually look more like earth than pictures from other planets. The heavy weathering seems characteristic of Earth.
Your mean, like, normal people, like the people who went to the moon?
A mars colony built with robotic equipment sent from earth, plus for bonus, an orbital teather (10^12 dollars or more before I put the book down)?How else would you build it? We are planning a tether on Earth now, which is at least three times as hard.
A frontier society that finally 'gets it together' and makes socialism work dispite evil capitalists (they want something for their 10^12 dollars)?Why not? This is fiction.
The capitalists bothering to take down the teather (why bother, hippies would be eating each other in six months)?I have no idea what you mean by this.
If you wanted to make more than an anti RH flame you might have suggested a distro which better suits your requirements.
BTW you can install KDE on redhat. Most of the redhat users I know use KDE.
I myself use the Tamil support of KDE, and have long found it superior to that of GNOME (even for recent releases).I am surprised that you bothered to try gnome at all. Why do all this research when KDE works so well?
Well thats exactly what it is, however the moons history orbiting earth has left it with a different composition from asteroids. The moon has hardly any water, while many asteroids are now known to have a lot of water.
So the distinction is still important. The real gray area is with the small outer moons of Jupiter which are called moons but are certainly captured asteroids.
The density of the ring doesn't have to be much for it to be visible, and its mass at any one time will be a fraction of the mass of even a very small moon. I don't have the numbers but I suspect the life of that moon will be measured in billions of years, quite possibly longer than the life of the sun.
GPS hardly ever works. You have to be aware of where the antenna is to get any signal at all. And criminals will still disable the software after stealing the laptop.
But customers will always want to jiggle them, and you don't want to frighten them away.
Stores like harvey norman seem to have a system with a wire attached to a little box stuck to the back of phones, palm tops, etc. There is a LED on the little box to show you that something will happen if the wire is cut.
A simple circuit which is broken when the cable is cut could have sounded the alarm. Perhaps a simple loop of wire which terminates in the display console, and loops through the cable fitting on the laptop. Use the current to hold a relay open. When the relay closes a sonalert goes off. Jaycar have lots of really loud buzzers.
Its funny because this was the idea with java all along and it crashed and burned 10 years ago. Of course Java was killed by Microsoft introducing a non-standard implementation on IE. Maybe the will do it again with javascript. OTH maybe Firefox will undercut microsoft and introduce a standard client. Perhaps it is time for people to consider (mostly) firefox specific java apps.
I didn't know that. I am off now to make up my own "Windows" trademark. I can feel retirement coming on.
Microsoft won in the end but I don't believe they had moral ownership of the word "windows". X was there before MS windows.
The state government here delayed the end of daylight savings by a week. The unix/linux admin at my work used ssh to fiddle with TZ settings on our linux boxes. The windows admin came up with some other scheme...
So there I am typing away in word and a DOS box pops up for about a second, runs a command and closes. Apparently the remote administration tool they use can't run without opening a window on the machine being administered.
Windows was designed from the gound up as a single user workstation. Unix was designed as a multi user server. In general it is easier to turn a server into a client than a client into a server.
Looks like a good opportunity for an Ambidextrous Linux/Windows Virus
But who ever installs Linspire? Doesn't it come installed from the shop?
Actually you do. If you want to resolve somesite.com.au your DNS will go to the root servers and ask for the DNS for .au
Then it goes to that DNS and asks for the DNS for .com.au
Then it goes to that DNS and asks for the DNS for somesite.com.au
If you or your browser specified www.somesite.com.au then it goes the DNS for somesite.com.au and asks for the IP address for www.somesite.com.au
NTP servers should be able to send a response to say "don't ask me, ask this other server" which is pretty much what DNS does.
Because, like SCO, they are going down. In six months time the name won't exist. Alcatel will do more business in the states, but because of the way big business and Government in the USA operate, this will never work in the long run.
Lucent's main assets are their patents and other IP. Alcatel will proceed to exploit this.
SCO, as I understand it, isn't really SCO. Its caldera using the SCO name. If they had kept their name it would be a better match for what is happening with Lucent.
This has the feel of SCO about it to me.