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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Tag: free
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Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter coverage
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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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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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Ways to deal with Junk Mail (1 of 2)
Who hasn’t ever seen junk mail? From the offers for prescription drugs to offers for who knows what. Some mail programs give you a way to filter out different senders, but the senders of junk mail are always changing (like viruses.) So what other tools are there? (more…)
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Get counted at the linux counter
One of the problems with “free software” that can be downloaded and installed on multiple machines without expense or legal recourse, is that it’s sometimes hard to know how many people run it. Yes, sure there are web statistics that might tell you if someone is using a different platform than windows. But what about those machines that don’t get used for web browsing, but sit firewalling or mail serving, or file serving their lives away without even getting to be a statistic in the big scheme of “market share” debates?
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Collection of Open Source software for Windows
This is a quick link to a downloadable cd of open source software for windows. There is a sizable list of programs. It appears as though some are not open source, but are free. If you have a fast enough connection to download it, you might find it very useful. If not, you might (more…)
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Court allows blocking of emails by Public University
This article details a ruling by the 5th U.S. Court of Appeals that finds the University of Texas did not violate any laws (constitutional or otherwise) by blocking what they deemed junk mail from an online dating service. It sounds as though one of the arguments was a 1st amendment (freedom of speech) violation.
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Google News feeds politics and free speech
One of the topics I plan to steer clear of most of the time here is politics. I don’t want this site (essentially for my business), to be engulfed with national political, conservative, liberal, etc… debates. It doesn’t fit with the structure I have in mind. However, at the intersection of political debate and technology there is room to touch on the topic. I’ve found an article which brings Google News into this mix.
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