The Globe and Mail has a good writeup on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is schedule to lift off Wednesday from Florida. It mentions some of the other upcoming space missions related to Mars and mentions that this specific craft could be a stepping stone for a manned mission in part because of it’s large array of sensors.
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Month: August 2005
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Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter coverage
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AJAX threatening Windows?
Long ago there was talk about the desktop not meaning anything anymore and that software would be delivered through the web. Well, it looks as though AJAX has brought that closer to reality. Wired news takes a look at where things are in the arena. Explains what Ajax is and what makes it so meaningful. ( Google Maps is one site that uses “AJAX”).
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DSL competitor access to lines ending
Among other sources, media law professors blog notes the FCC’s decision to reclassify broadband. Effectively the decision will remove the requirement of phone providers to allow for competitors to have access to their lines for the providing of DSL service.
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OpenGL asking for help as Vista appears poised to make it useless
It looks as though Windows Vista has been designed to essentially neutralized the usability of OpenGL, one of two competing 3d acceleration apis. Directx *(by Microsoft) is the other competing API and from what I read, the current structure makes OpenGL applications run through Directx cutting performance by 50%, preventing upgrades of the API and it would appear essentially killing off their graphics API competition.
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Cyberextortion
The New York Times online has an article on the rise of Cyberextortion. Businesses are usually targetted. That was true in the case of the focus of this article.
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Ever want to publish a book?
This is a WOW idea. This article at the Financial Mirror, talks about Bob Young, the founder of Red Hat Linux, and his latest venture. The venture is called Lulu and if you’ll pardon me it’s a “Lulu” of an idea. Basically, if you have a book you would like to get published you can do so through this site and sell individual copies. Yes, traditionally you have to get a book deal and they do a printing of thousands of copies (if they think your book will sell.) This is book publishing for the “on demand” mindset.
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Open Source (linux) giving new life to some older software
Internet news has an article about open source (specifically the GPL license) giving new life to several old software ideas. Gopher is mentioned as is the atari 2600, amiga os among others.
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Australia to ask Google Maps to pull images over security concerns
According to this article, Australia will ask Google to pull satellite photos of its only Nuclear plant. It’s worth noting that several locations in the US Capital are either reduced resolution or blocked out with solid colors. Now that we live in an era of private satellite imagery are services like MSN’s Virtual Earth and Google’s Maps giving away TOO much information?
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Linux code drastically improved
According to this writeup(in spanish), an analysis of linux kernel code in the 2.6.12 version compared to 2.6.9 is drastically improved.
Coverity, makes software tools that analyze source code for errors. The 2.6.9 analysis turned up 6 severe errors and 985 smaller problems. The 2.6.12 analysis uncovered no severe problems. There was an increase in small problems though to 1008. (An increase of 2.3 %), The total size of the codebase though, increased by 4.7%. Meaning the pecentage of problems to lines of code went down.
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